tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38830800933081562272018-08-13T16:42:08.413-07:00EmpiricaL. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-42515119673558695472018-04-10T10:15:00.000-07:002018-04-10T16:14:08.498-07:00Paleomedicina Clinical Open Days <div class="document" id="paleomedicina-clinical-open-days"> <p>I have just returned from Zalaszentgrót, Hungary, for the <a class="reference external" href="https://www.paleomedicina.com/en/clinical_open_days_program">Paleomedicina Clinical Open Days</a>where I listened to many interesting case reports and lectures about the Paleolithic Ketogenic Diet (PKD). The PKD is a diet that takes the best from both the Paleo and the ketogenic diets, and in its most strict form excludes all plants.</p><p>I presented a talk there as well, "Personal experiences in long-term carnivorous eating: benefits beyond carbohydrate restriction", in which I retold my own story, made some distinctions between the goals, benefits, and pitfalls of ketogenic diets vs carnivorous diets, and showed some data I collected from the Zero Carb style carnivorous dieters who generously filled out the survey I designed. The video will be released soon, and I will post a link and the slide set then.</p><p>I have been avidly following the research of this group since I first encountered the case report <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ijcasereportsandimages.com/archive/2016/009-2016-ijcri/CR-10690-09-2016-toth/ijcri-1069009201690-toth-full-text.php">Crohn's disease successfully treated with the paleolithic ketogenic diet</a> by Csaba Tóth et al. a couple of years ago. They have published several such papers describing the results of their clinical experience in successfully treating a wide variety of conditions with the PKD, including cancer. Given my own first and second hand experience with the unexpectedly profound difference between a ketogenic diet including plants and one excluding it, I am as sympathetic as one could be toward their approach. Nonetheless, visiting in person and hearing more about their methods, measurements, and clinical experiences deepened my appreciation for their work, and I anticipate spending a great deal of time in the coming weeks studying intestinal permeability and autoimmune conditions. Even though I have heard a little about this topic previously, I have never studied it deeply or fully understood its potential as an explanatory mechanism in the array of conditions that I know plant free diets address.</p><p>In particular, the putative connection between intestinal permeability and microbiome cultivation biased me against delving into it further, because my short, but not insignificant forays into studying microbiome research has always led me to ideas promoting plant intake which not only did I find incoherent and untenable, but they directly contradicted my own experience and that of many others. I did not realise that the mechanisms involved are perfectly consistent with plant intake causing detriment, and so this event has completely changed my attitude toward this work, and I am eager to learn more.</p><p>I am greatly indebted to all the staff from the clinic for their work, and especially to Zsófia Clemens, Csaba Tóth, and Andrea Dabóczi for their generous hosting at this event.</p><p>I also want to mention this PKD recipe book, <em>The Human Carnivore Recipe Collection</em> by Mária Schimmer which I understand is being translated into English!</p><div class="figure"><img alt="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1XN9YudodDc/Wszs_ULhhnI/AAAAAAAAFUs/kebKuPoxlMkT05kfXtSegEt-73dkqtE_wCLcBGAs/s400/PKD-recipes.JPG" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1XN9YudodDc/Wszs_ULhhnI/AAAAAAAAFUs/kebKuPoxlMkT05kfXtSegEt-73dkqtE_wCLcBGAs/s400/PKD-recipes.JPG" /></div></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttps://plus.google.com/113782144203963547532noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-13373420645936859932017-03-17T10:43:00.000-07:002017-03-17T12:25:44.220-07:00Pork Fat Hollandaise<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/--6P1iJtfTMs/WMwVPtOt5aI/AAAAAAAAC2E/H9gm9OS3C30UEvMOyKjyXVZ4BBz4Yh_lQCLcB/s1600/0315170831b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/--6P1iJtfTMs/WMwVPtOt5aI/AAAAAAAAC2E/H9gm9OS3C30UEvMOyKjyXVZ4BBz4Yh_lQCLcB/s640/0315170831b.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br />Since the early days of my carnivorous life, I've been wishing for something like mayonnaise to eat with leaner meat. &nbsp;Heaven forbid I should end up with leftover chicken breast, because I cooked the whole beast and the wacko lean-eaters didn't finish it off, for example.<br /><br />I tried a few times to make mayonnaise with bacon fat, but my results were inconsistent. &nbsp;Sometimes it broke, and even when it didn't, it never turned out as delicious as one would think it should. &nbsp;Come on, it's bacon. &nbsp;It ought to be divine! &nbsp;Yet, it remained dissatisfying. &nbsp;For one thing, I always found the vinegar or lemon juice to overpower the delicate taste. &nbsp;For another, because I hadn't yet learned to roast bacon in the oven, the nearly inevitable bits of burn flavour from the pan were somehow always accentuated in an unpleasant way. &nbsp;The bottom line was nobody, not even I, wanted to eat it.<br /><br />Once I discovered that I like to eat plain tallow, lard, or schmaltz on meat, or even just on a spoon, I more or less forgot about the idea, until recently, when I started wishing for it again.<br /><br />The first thing you have to deal with when making carnivorous mayonnaise is the fact that animal fat is not usually pourable at room temperature. &nbsp;So you have to melt it first. &nbsp;One day, I suddenly thought about hollandaise sauce, which is basically mayonnaise but made over heat with melted butter instead of oil. &nbsp;The gears began turning.<br /><br />In mayonnaise, it is recommended that all the ingredients are at room temperature, but in hollandaise sauce we heat the yolks about as much as possible without actually cooking them. &nbsp;The reason they need to be warm is that the proteins in yolks are tightly folded, and heat allows them to unfold enough to be able to surround the fat droplets and emulsify them. &nbsp;If they unfold too much, they start binding with each other irreversibly, and you get scrambled eggs. &nbsp;The reason for heating the yolks first, then, is that warmer yolks allow more emulsion, but you have to be careful.<br /><br />The reason for the addition of acid took me longer to discover. &nbsp;There are a lot of sites claiming it's to kill bacteria in the raw yolk. &nbsp;I don't really buy that. &nbsp;I doubt it would be effective and anyway I'm not <span style="font-family: inherit;">really concerned about it. &nbsp;Others mentioned that it would add surface area to increase emulsion. &nbsp;While that's plausible, you could just as easily add water. &nbsp;I was more persuaded by people who admitted they were doing it simply for taste. &nbsp;That's a fine reason, if you are into it. &nbsp;However, according to&nbsp;<a href="https://stellaculinary.com/content/how-make-hollandaise-french-mother-sauce">Jacob Burton of Stella Culinary</a>, the real reason is that yolks normally curdle somewhere&nbsp;</span>between 71-76°C, but acid raises the curdling temperature to 90°C, which gives you more of a safety net.<br /><br />In my first experiments with bacon fat hollandaise, I didn't bother with acid, and I still prefer it without. &nbsp;However, I did break it a few times by pouring the fat straight from the oven. &nbsp;Now I know better, and I've finally found a use for my old candy thermometer, which is one of those tools from the bad old days that I've kept around for no prior reason other than that I'm a recovering hoarder.<br /><br />Here's what I do to make hollandaise from animal fat, in this case using pork fat I bought from the butcher<span style="font-family: inherit;"> for&nbsp;</span>99¢/lb. &nbsp;I've tried butter, tallow, and blends of the three. &nbsp;Next time I plan to try schmaltz.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Rh71YE1xhJk/WMwaJxuoWOI/AAAAAAAAC2U/zUafxg9dtrUXbfgEOOgAipYKwsfXqnOiwCLcB/s1600/0309171802.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="181" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Rh71YE1xhJk/WMwaJxuoWOI/AAAAAAAAC2U/zUafxg9dtrUXbfgEOOgAipYKwsfXqnOiwCLcB/s320/0309171802.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />I rendered some of the fat by roasting for 20 minutes at&nbsp;475°F (the pan was initially full, but it shrank).<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dyCN-e5OWRbbAyEvSPd50JQbnVB9QupsxJ58IINCopZet1BXifh-lLUpg4LrRJF2jobuggK8k1lVGj92x2DpQ' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0' /></div><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1e1e; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1e1e; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span>I took off the crispy pork pieces, and left the fat to cool for a while. &nbsp;Then I poured the liquid gold into a small bowl easier to pour from.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-z9_gvAD8Jas/WMwbOvWAR9I/AAAAAAAAC2w/_Li09ufV5j0NdBFyuhnWRHplvddrrLu0ACEw/s1600/0315170712b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-z9_gvAD8Jas/WMwbOvWAR9I/AAAAAAAAC2w/_Li09ufV5j0NdBFyuhnWRHplvddrrLu0ACEw/s320/0315170712b.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Nq_tiAVD3Qc/WMwbjztpKKI/AAAAAAAAC20/B6DhrcfWSrIaQxqy8ylo9_ERe1VWXq0sACLcB/s1600/0315170818a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Nq_tiAVD3Qc/WMwbjztpKKI/AAAAAAAAC20/B6DhrcfWSrIaQxqy8ylo9_ERe1VWXq0sACLcB/s320/0315170818a.jpg" width="180" /></span></a></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />I used an immersion blender to blend four yolks, with the blending cup itself immersed in a bowl of boiled water. &nbsp;Then once they were as thick as they were going to get, I drizzled in all the pork fat, about 6oz.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BLdcW_hHw68/WMwclsMAh6I/AAAAAAAAC3I/EM9uzvoPx90GQgs9Thz5goqf1m9bQyhwgCLcB/s1600/0315170826c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BLdcW_hHw68/WMwclsMAh6I/AAAAAAAAC3I/EM9uzvoPx90GQgs9Thz5goqf1m9bQyhwgCLcB/s320/0315170826c.jpg" width="180" /></a></div><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XPIh_04morg/WMwclttxpwI/AAAAAAAAC3E/ciEVfXtx1NoSfybYwVxScCpeT8ex6ZrdgCLcB/s1600/0315170821.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XPIh_04morg/WMwclttxpwI/AAAAAAAAC3E/ciEVfXtx1NoSfybYwVxScCpeT8ex6ZrdgCLcB/s320/0315170821.jpg" width="180" /></a>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-14ot2Kl-DJA/WMwclVu8kOI/AAAAAAAAC3A/Rbuwg6Zync4lvMazweSLo1dR7B0wyOsLwCLcB/s1600/0315170824.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-14ot2Kl-DJA/WMwclVu8kOI/AAAAAAAAC3A/Rbuwg6Zync4lvMazweSLo1dR7B0wyOsLwCLcB/s320/0315170824.jpg" width="180" /></a><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GBoGeAmKtNw/WMwcmzmMv2I/AAAAAAAAC3M/YbuejYSnKd85_-xgNQUX0zDL03NfDf_QwCLcB/s1600/0315170827c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GBoGeAmKtNw/WMwcmzmMv2I/AAAAAAAAC3M/YbuejYSnKd85_-xgNQUX0zDL03NfDf_QwCLcB/s320/0315170827c.jpg" width="180" /></span></a></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1e1e; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #1e1e1e; font-family: inherit;">It works beautifully, and it's easy, but best of all, I like it! &nbsp;(And so do my children if I happen to leave any unfinished.)</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1e1e; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xiixqe_zmkc/WMwdLlpXhMI/AAAAAAAAC3U/VG3qBnS2DI44Lrw3_uHpvMgqLTnyFqxUwCLcB/s1600/0315170832a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xiixqe_zmkc/WMwdLlpXhMI/AAAAAAAAC3U/VG3qBnS2DI44Lrw3_uHpvMgqLTnyFqxUwCLcB/s320/0315170832a.jpg" width="246" /></span></a></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1e1e; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span>L. Amber O'Hearnhttps://plus.google.com/113782144203963547532noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-29303467387350116512017-02-21T11:49:00.000-08:002017-02-22T07:36:22.034-08:00C is for Carnivore<div class="document" id="c-is-for-carnivore"> <p>In <a class="reference external" href="http://www.breaknutrition.com/ketogenic-diet-vitamin-c-101/">a guest post I wrote for Break Nutrition today</a>I showed that the RDA for vitamin C is grossly inflated, particularly on a ketogenic diet. The amount of vitamin C that prevents scurvy, even in carb-eaters, is at most a mere 10 mg a day, and there is little support for taking extra, unless your system is overloaded with glucose.</p><div class="section" id="it-is-known-but-not-widely-acknowledged-that-fresh-meat-cures-scurvy"><h3>It is known, but not widely acknowledged that fresh meat cures scurvy.</h3><p>This was discovered over a hundred years ago. I recently happened upon an issue of the Lancet from August, 1882, in which there was much debate: not about <em>whether</em> fresh meat cures scurvy, that was known, but rather about <em>why</em> fresh meat cures scurvy, but hung or dried meat does not. A few authors referred to previous work, and were I able to pursue the Writing Life more fully, I might take it upon myself to chronicle this discovery. For today I have just excerpted some of my favourite quotes which you can find below.</p><p>Something I want to point out about these early conversations is that no one is specifying that they were using organ meats in particular, and there is no reason to believe they were. While it's true that liver, for example, is very high in vitamin C, the fact is that there is enough in plain old skeletal muscle meat to do the trick.</p></div><div class="section" id="the-usda-database-is-willfully-wrong"><h3>The USDA database is willfully wrong</h3><p>If you go to the standard reference, <a class="reference external" href="https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list">the USDA database</a>(or its proxy on self.com), it lists most meat flesh as containing no vitamin C at all. This is nonsensical. Not only does it contradict reports such as from the Lancet, but anywhere there is collagen, there is bound to be some vitamin C. I used to assume this was rounding error, and that the amounts were negligible, but that's not true.</p><p>On further searching, I discovered that the practice of the USDA labs with respect to muscle meat of mammals is to fill in vitamin C as <em>assumed to be zero</em>! You can this documented in the <a class="reference external" href="https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/80400525/Data/Meat/Retail_Beef_Cuts03.pdf">USDA Nutrient Data Set for Retail Beef Cuts</a>. Every micronutrient was measured directly, with the exception of vitamin C. It's egregious. They don't do this with fish or shellfish, or even organ meats, but I verified they do it with beef and pork, and presumably that's the practice with all the other meats listed at 0.0mg vitamin C.</p><p>I was only able to find one old report that lists some measurements of vitamin Cin various tissues of a few animals including some livestock.</p><p>From <a class="reference external" href="https://books.google.com/books?isbn=3709157617">Die Ascorbinsäure in der Pflanzenzelle. Vitamin C in the Animal Cell</a> By Helmut Metzner, Geoffrey H. Bourne Springer-Verlag, Mar 8, 2013</p><div class="figure"><img alt="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-b8maK84yU-M/WGAqqJymCEI/AAAAAAAAAKc/KZrU1wHZ9AkivUW992a5646xZB2CjOdhQCLcB/s400/vitamin_c_in_tissue.png" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-b8maK84yU-M/WGAqqJymCEI/AAAAAAAAAKc/KZrU1wHZ9AkivUW992a5646xZB2CjOdhQCLcB/s400/vitamin_c_in_tissue.png" style="width: 10cm;" /></div><p>As you can see, the worst case scenario comes from a measurement of ox, which had 1.6mg/100g. It seems to me that the real value for beef is likely to be more, especially considering that sheep was reported here at nearly twice that. But even if we take that pessimistic value, it's clear that we can still get our antiscorbutic dose from 625g (less than 1.5 lbs) of beef.</p></div><div class="section" id="the-bottom-line-is-that-even-on-a-diet-of-just-muscle-meat-you-should-expect-to-get-enough-vitamin-c"><h3>The bottom line is that even on a diet of just muscle meat, you should expect to get enough vitamin C.</h3><p>The vitamin C present in meat, along with the vitamin C sparing effect of low carb diets is enough to prevent scurvy, even without going out of your way to eat liver or other organs. Save those for pleasure!</p></div><div><p><i>Edited to Add: In conversation about this post, Esmée La Fleur pointed out to me that American beef is typically hung, but we are not seeing scurvy in the modern Zero Carb / Carnivore community (with the exception of two cases I've heard of where the people were eating exclusively pemmican for long periods). That includes Stefánsson. Michael Goldstein pointed out that Stefánsson's writings indicate that Inuit ate most meat well done. My hypothesis from these added points is that perhaps hanging and some cooking reduces vitamin C enough that for those still eating glucose, it's not enough to be antiscorbutic, but for carnivores it may be. I'd love to get accurate modern measurements. </i></p></div><hr class="docutils" /><div class="section" id="selected-notes-from-the-lancet-volume-123"><h3>Selected notes from the Lancet volume 123</h3><p>You can find this in Google books <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id2" id="id1">[1]</a>.</p><p>p 329. From a medical report from Mr. W. H. Neale, M.B. B.S. medical officer of the <em>Eira</em>, about an Arctic expedition:</p><p>"For the boat journey we saved 40 lb. of tinned meat (per man), and 351b. of tinned soups(per man), 3cwt. of biscuit, and about 800lb. of walrus me it, which was cooked and soldered up by our blacksmith in old provision tins. About 80 lb. of tea were saved, enabling us to have tea night and morning till almost the day we were picked up. No lime-juice was saved. A few bottles of wine and brandy were secured, and kept for Mr. Leigh-Smith and invalids. All the rum was saved, and every man was allowed one-fifth of a gill per day until May 1st, 1882, when it was decided to keep the remaining eighteen gallons for the boats. One man was a teetotaler from January to June, and was quite as healthy as anyone else. Personally it made very little difference whether I took the allowance of "grog" or not. One of the sick men was also a teetotaler nearly all the time. During the boat journey the men preferred their grog when doing any hard work, a fact I could never agree to, but when wet and cold a glass of grog before going to sleep seemed to give warmth to the body and helped to send one to sleep. Whilst sailing, also, one glass of grog would give temporary warmth ; but everyone acknowledged that a mug of hot tea was far better when it was fit weather to make a fire. I do not think that spirits or lime-juice is much use as anti scorbutics ; for if you live on the flesh of the country even, I believe, without vegetables, you will run very little risk of scurvy. There was not a sign of scurvy amongst us, not even an anaemic face. I have brought home a sample of bear and walrus meat in a tin, which I intend to have analysed if it is still in good preservation ; and then it will be a question as to how it will be best to preserve the meat of the country in such a form as to enable a sufficient supply to be taken on long sledge journeys ; for as long as you have plenty of ventilation and plenty of meat, anyone can live out an Arctic winter without fear of scurvy, even if they lie for days in their beds, as our men were compelled to do in the winter when the weather was too bad to go outside (there being no room inside for more than six or seven to be up at one time)."</p><p>p331, John Lucas: "Sir, —A propos the annotation appearing under the above heading in The Lancet of June 24th, pp. 1048-9, I would beg permission to observe that almost every medical man in India will be able to endorse the views of Dr. Moore, to which you refer. Medical officers of native regiments notice almost daily in their hospital practice that—to use your writer's words—"insufficient diet will cause scurvy even if fresh vegetable material forms a part of the diet, though more rapidly if it is withheld." Indeed, so far as my humble experience as a regimental surgeon from observations on the same men goes, I am inclined to think that the meat-eating classes of our Sepoys—to wit, the Mahomedans, especially those from the Punjaub—are comparatively seldom seen with the scorbutic taint ; while, on the contrary, the subjects are, in the main, vegetable feeders who are their non-meat-eating comrades, the Hindus (Parboos from the North- West Provinces and Deccan Mahrattas), especially those whose daily food is barely sufficient either in quality or quantity. A sceptic may refuse to accept this view on the ostensible reason that though the food of the meat-eating classes be such, it may, perchance, contain vegetable ingredients as well as meat. To this I would submit the rejoinder that as a matter of fact, quite apart from all theory and hypothesis, the food of these meat-eating classes does not always contain much, or any, vegetables. In the case of the semi-savage hill tribes of Afghanistan and Baluchistan, their food contains large amounts of meat (mutton), and is altogether devoid of vegetables. The singular immunity from scurvy of these races has struck me as a remarkable physiological circumstance, which should make us pause before accepting the vegetable doctrine in relation to scurvy et hoc genus omne."</p><p>p370 Charles Henry Ralphe "To the Editor of The Lancet. Sir, —I was struck by two independent observations which occurred in your columns last week with regard to the etiology of scurvy, both tending to controvert the generally received opinion that the exclusive cause of the disease is the prolonged and complete withdrawal of succulent vegetables from the dietary of those affected. Thus Mr. Neale, of the Eira Arctic Expedition, says : " I do not think that spirit or limejuice is of much use as an anti scorbutic ; for if you live on the flesh of the country, even, I believe, without vegetables, you will run very little risk of scurvy." Dr. Lucas writes: "In the case of the semi- savage hill tribes of Afghanistan and Beluchistan their food contains a large amount of meat, and is altogether devoid of vegetables. The singular immunity from scurvy of these races has struck me as a remarkable physiological circumstance, which should make us pause before accepting the vegetable doctrine in relation to scurvy." These observations do not stand alone. Arctic voyagers have long pointed out the antiscorbutic properties of fresh meat, and Baron Larrey, with regard to hot climates, arrived at the same conclusion in the Egyptian expedition under Bonaparte, at the end of last century."</p><p>p495 "SCURVY. Dr. Buzzard, in a letter which appeared in oar columns last week, considers the fact that the crew of the Eira were supplied with preserved vegetables tells against the supposition advanced by Mr. Neale, that if Arctic voyagers were to feed only on the flesh of the animals supplied by the country they would be able to dispense with lime-juice. The truth is, it is an open question with many as to the relative antiscorbutic properties of preserved vegetables, and whether under the circumstances in which the Eira's crew were placed they would have been sufficient, in the absence of lime-juice and fresh meat, to have preserved the crew from scurvy. A case in point is the outbreak that occurred on board the Adventure, in the surveying voyages of that vessel and the Beagle. The Adventure had been anchored in Port Famine for several months, and although "pickles, cranberries, large quantities of wild celery, preserved meats and soups, had been abundantly supplied," still great difficulty had been experienced in obtaining fresh meat, and they were dependent on an intermittent supply from wild-fowl and a few shell-fish. Scurvy appeared early in July, fourteen cases, including the assistant-surgeon, being down with it. At the end of July fresh meat was obtained; at first it seemed to prove ineffectual, but an ample supply being continued, the commander was able to report, by the end of August, " the timely supply of guanaco meat had certainly checked the scurvy." This is an instance in which articles of diet having recognised antiscorbutic properties proved insufficient, in the absence of lime-juice and fresh meat, and under conditions of exceptional hardship, exposure, and depressing influence, to prevent the occurrence of scurvy. So with the Eira, we believe that had they not fortunately been able to obtain abundant supplies of fresh meat, scurvy would have appeared, and that the preserved vegetables in the absence of lime-juice would have proved insufficient as antiscorbutics. This antiscorbutic virtue of fresh meat has long been recognised by Arctic explorers, and, strangely, their experience in this respect is quite at variance with ours in Europe. It has been sought to explain the immunity from the disease of the Esquimaux, who live almost exclusively on seal and walrus flesh daring the winter months, by maintaining that the protection is derived from the herbage extracted from the stomach of reindeer they may kill. In view, however, of the small proportion of vegetable matter that would be thus obtained for each member of the tribe, and the intermittent nature of the supply, it can hardly be maintained that the antiscorbutic supplied in this way is sufficient unless there are other conditions tending in the same direction. And of these, one, as we have already stated, consists probably in the fact that the flesh is eaten without lactic acid decomposition having taken place, owing either to its being devoured immediately, or from its becoming frozen. The converse being the case in Europe, where meat is hung some time after rigor mortis has passed off, and lactic acid develops to a considerable extent. This seems a rational explanation, and it reconciles the discrepancy of opinion that exists between European and Arctic observers with regard to meat as an antiscorbutic. In bringing forward the claims of the flesh of recently killed animals as an antiscorbutic, it must be understood that we fully uphold the doctrine that the exclusive cause of scurvy is due to the insufficient supply of fresh vegetable food, and that it can be only completely cured by their administration ; but if the claims advanced with regard to the antiscorbutic qualities of recently slaughtered flesh be proved, then we have ascertained a fact which ought to be of the greatest practical value with regard to the conduct of exploring expeditions, and every effort should be made to obtain it. Everything, moreover, conducive to the improvement of the sailor's dietary ought to receive serious consideration, and it has therefore seemed to us that the remarks of Mr. Neale and Dr. Lucas are especially worthy of attention, whilst we think the suggestion of the former gentleman with regard to the use of the blood of slaughtered animals likely to prove of special value."</p><p>p913 "Sir, —In a foot-note to page 49G of his " Manual of Practical Hygiene,", fifth edition, (London, Churchill, 1878), Parkes says : —"For a good deal of evidence up to 1818, I beg to refer to a review I contributed on scurvy in the British and Foreign. Medico-Chirurgical Review in that year. The evidence since this period has added, I believe, little to our knowledge, except to show that the preservation and curative powers of fresh meat in large quantities, and especially raw meat (Kane's Arctic Expedition), will not only prevent, but will cure scurvy. Kane found the raw meat of the walrus a certain cure. For the most recent evidence and much valuable information, see the Report of the Admiralty Committee on the Scurvy which occurred in the Arctic Expedition of 1875-76 (Blue Hook, 1877)." I think that the last sentence in the above is not Parkes' own, but that it must have been added by the editor in order to bring it up to the date of the issue of the current edition. The experience since then of the Arctic Expedition in the Eira coincides with these. I refer to that portion of the report where the author tells us that "our food consisted chiefly of War and walrus meat, mixing some of the bear's blood with the soup when possible." And again: "I do not think that, spirits or lime-juice is much use as an antiscorbutic, for if you live on the flesh of the country, even, I believe, without vegetables, you will run very little risk of scurvy. There was not a sign of scurvy amongst us, not even an anaemic face," (Lancet, Aug. 26th.) So that, as far as this question of fresh meat and raw meat and their prophylactic and curative properties are concerned, ample evidence will be found in other published literature to corroborate that of the Eira. But when you take up the question of the particular change which takes place in meat from its fresh to its stale condition, you will find a great deal of diversity and little harmony at opinion. Without taking up other authors on the subject, we stick to Parkes and compare his with Pr. I ; life'.-, views on this point. Parkes thought "fresh, and especially raw meat, is also useful, and this is conjectured to be from its amount of lactic acid ; but this is uncertain,"1 while on the other hand Dr. Ralfe repeats, as a probable explanation, too, of the reason of fresh meat being an anti scorbutic, but that it is due to the absence of lactic acid. For, from well-known chemical facts he deduces the following: — " In hot climates meat has to be eaten so freshly killed that no lime is allowed for the development of the lactic acid : in arctic regions the freezing arrests its formation. The muscle plasma, therefore, remains alkaline. In Europe the meat is invariably hung, lactic acid is developed freely, and the muscle plasma is consequently acid. If, therefore, scurvy is, as I have endeavoured to show ("Inquiry into the General Pathology of Scurvy"), due to diminished alkalinity of the blood, it can be easily understood that meat may be antiscorbutic when fresh killed, or frozen immediately after killing, but scorbutic when these alkaline salts have been converted into acid ones by lactic acid decomposition.'"-' The view of the alkalinity of the blood coincides with Dr. Garrod's theory, which, however, appears to have as a sine qua turn the absence of a particular salt- namely, potash. I am inclined to think that, taking into account the nervous symptoms which are not infrequently associated with a certain proportion of scorbutic cases, resulting probably from the changes taking place in the blood, not unlike those which occur in gout and rheumatism, there must be some material change produced in the sympathetic system. In many of the individuals tainted with scurvy there were slight and severe attacks of passing jaundice in the cases which occurred in Afghanistan. Can we possibly trace this icteric condition to this cause? This is but a conjecture so far. But there certainly is in Garrod's observations an important point which, if applicable to all countries, climates, and conditions of life, is sufficiently weighty to indicate the necessity for farther research in that direction, and that point is this : the scorbutic condition disappeared on the patient being given a few grains of potash, though kept strictly on precisely the same diet which produced scurvy. —I am, Sir, yours truly, Ahmedabad, India, 30th Sept., 1882. JOHN C. LUCAS."</p><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id2" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id1">[1]</a></td><td>Note: I have taken the liberty to change just a couple of unimportant words in these passages to serve as a watermark. Why? Because I have taken much pain to chronicle this. With other passages in the past, I have sometimes even had to write them out by hand, only to find them copied and pasted into other people's blogs on the topic with absolutely no attribution, as if they conceived the whole topic and did the research themselves. <strong>Please, if you find my work useful, cite me!</strong></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- one glass of grog = a glass of grog their food contains large amounts = a large amount the exclusive cause of the disease = that disease and it reconciles = and reconciles theory, which, however = theory, which latter, however --></div></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-42886589029511725532016-03-21T20:11:00.001-07:002016-03-21T20:11:17.074-07:00Ribeye Jerky <div class="document" id="ribeye-jerky"> <div class="figure"><img alt="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-72HF4tAfZB0/VvCVKJ0zPwI/AAAAAAAAAH4/zPM_tiYoqAEJbUDg_0jvtD_disnonGAWQ/s1600/ribeye-jerky-sunlight.jpg" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-72HF4tAfZB0/VvCVKJ0zPwI/AAAAAAAAAH4/zPM_tiYoqAEJbUDg_0jvtD_disnonGAWQ/s1600/ribeye-jerky-sunlight.jpg" style="width: 10cm;" /></div><hr class="docutils" /><div class="section" id="i-ve-taken-to-making-fatty-jerky-in-the-dehydrator-from-thinly-sliced-chuck-steaks-they-sell-at-my-local-grocery-store"><h3>I've taken to making fatty "jerky" in the dehydrator from thinly sliced chuck steaks they sell at my local grocery store.</h3><p>It looks like this:</p><div class="figure"><img alt="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-q1IIHq7T_Ao/VvCgvwzAfiI/AAAAAAAAAIM/9mjBc105l5MbKWd5dDB-DBJdFeCEHHb9A/s320/chuck-jerky.jpg" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-q1IIHq7T_Ao/VvCgvwzAfiI/AAAAAAAAAIM/9mjBc105l5MbKWd5dDB-DBJdFeCEHHb9A/s320/chuck-jerky.jpg" style="width: 10cm;" /></div><p>It absolutely melts in the mouth as it is, though, believe it or not, I sometimes spread butter on it.</p><p>My local store also sells thinly sliced ribeye. This I consider a crime. There is no way to cook it to rare like that.</p><p>Yesterday, however, I was looking for the thinly sliced chuck and they had none. What they <em>did</em> have was thinly sliced ribeye, marked down for no apparent reason. I realised that it cost only slightly more than what I pay for the chuck, and a beautiful idea formed in my mind...</p></div><div class="section" id="here-are-some-photos-of-the-succulent-result"><h3>Here are some photos of the succulent result:</h3><p>It's definitely not the best ribeye I've had, but it's easily the best jerky.</p><div class="figure"><img alt="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-spnyNyZYx_k/VvCVJzVKjQI/AAAAAAAAAH0/SgvxKySPjywbIijHtz5ZtHB6tL83MIgcA/s1600/ribeye-jerky-pull.jpg" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-spnyNyZYx_k/VvCVJzVKjQI/AAAAAAAAAH0/SgvxKySPjywbIijHtz5ZtHB6tL83MIgcA/s1600/ribeye-jerky-pull.jpg" style="width: 10cm;" /></div><div class="figure"><img alt="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OHw5lWwTrR4/VvCVJRNBjuI/AAAAAAAAAHo/iAGOZFW7omMpWAU0l6QR7PI8eVY7PecDg/s1600/ribeye-jerky-bitten-0.jpg" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OHw5lWwTrR4/VvCVJRNBjuI/AAAAAAAAAHo/iAGOZFW7omMpWAU0l6QR7PI8eVY7PecDg/s1600/ribeye-jerky-bitten-0.jpg" style="width: 10cm;" /></div><div class="figure"><img alt="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gwmeL8TGeJY/VvCVJXUAo3I/AAAAAAAAAHs/lYPnUii846c7NQ3peJ-j5xD3jWRAn50Og/s1600/ribeye-jerky-bitten.jpg" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gwmeL8TGeJY/VvCVJXUAo3I/AAAAAAAAAHs/lYPnUii846c7NQ3peJ-j5xD3jWRAn50Og/s1600/ribeye-jerky-bitten.jpg" style="width: 10cm;" /></div><div class="figure"><img alt="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-c6kPIyFmcFo/VvCVJXgrBqI/AAAAAAAAAHw/qwj22YgncwA-uWQIXwP_cGqPfiD8dd-1w/s1600/amber-with-ribeye-jerky.jpg" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-c6kPIyFmcFo/VvCVJXgrBqI/AAAAAAAAAHw/qwj22YgncwA-uWQIXwP_cGqPfiD8dd-1w/s1600/amber-with-ribeye-jerky.jpg" style="width: 10cm;" /></div><!-- https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Mhk4gQHFST0/VvCq76YgwcI/AAAAAAAAAIg/BcsrEFJRJd0ohaIZwf2NUByisMUiewyYw/s1600/thin-ribeye-sale.jpg --></div></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-11982322818458486692016-03-21T20:11:00.000-07:002016-03-21T20:37:32.079-07:00Meatless Mondays <div class="document" id="meatless-monday"> <h2 class="subtitle" id="what-is-it-called-when-a-carnivore-doesn-t-eat-meat">What is it called when a carnivore doesn't eat meat?</h2> <p>A fast.</p><p>I've recently had a renewed interest in fasting, no doubt because of seeing <a class="reference external" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIuj-oMN-Fk">Jason Fung speak at Low Carb Vail last month</a>.</p><p>Shortly after that I was chatting with a friend about it. I said that I don't fast on a schedule, but that I often eat only one meal a day (most often two meals). I did mention that I've long thought it would be fun to fast once a week for a whole day — that would be more than 24 hours, since I don't eat during the night.</p><p>So for the first two Mondays in March, I did just that. (That is, I ate no meat. I did drink my usual coffee, and I had a few spoons of tallow in the afternoon when my energy was dipping.) In practice the first fast was 48 hours, and the second more like 42. I enjoyed it.</p><p>Under a fat-based metabolism, one doesn't normally feel hungry throughout the day. The liver takes care of glucose and all that, much better than for those on a glycolytic diet. So I wasn't hungry.</p><p>I lost a few pounds, and was down to my lowest weight in decades. I know from experience that weight loss from short term fasting is often transient, so I wasn't really worried about it, or counting on it staying off, but it was still fun.</p><p>This past week, however, I have been <em>ravenous</em>. My policy is always to feed my body when it's hungry. Fighting hunger is a losing battle. If you're hungry, there's a hormonal reason. It's a signal. You can't change it simply by not eating (except insofar as not eating changes your hormonal state). This is counterproductive. You have to change the signal.</p><p>Anyway, today I intended to fast again, but I was hungry and the tallow didn't help and by the time I got home I was ready to eat. So I did. Besides, I had <a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/2016/03/ribeye-jerky.html">ribeye jerky</a> waiting for me.</p></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-92046684663527236712016-02-07T12:04:00.000-08:002016-02-07T15:58:32.164-08:00Mindfulness Strength Training <div class="document" id="mindfulness-strength-training"> <!-- -*- coding: utf-8-with-signature -*- --><p>I first heard about slow lifting protocols around 2007 or 2008. I was reading articles about muscle physiology by Doug McGuff. Those articles don't appear to exist anymore, perhaps superceded by his 2009 book, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071597174/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0071597174&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=theketdieforh-20&amp;linkId=4SAY5R75SJGFDGD6">Body by Science</a>. At the same time I had happened upon Adam Zickerman and Bill Schley's 2003 book, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006000889X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=006000889X&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=theketdieforh-20&amp;linkId=AHTXFEKX6ZNEEQY2">Power of 10</a>. I quickly then found that Fred Hahn, and Michael and Mary Dan Eades had also written a 2003 book on this topic, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;field-keywords=slow%20burn%20fitness%20revolution&amp;linkCode=ur2&amp;sprefix=slow%20burn%20fit%2Caps%2C663&amp;tag=theketdieforh-20&amp;url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;linkId=ZCAU4OACQ3MP5VSX">The Slow Burn Fitness Revolution</a>.</p><p>Here are the fundamental concepts behind this powerful paradigm.</p><ol class="arabic"><li><p class="first">Strength training is the most effective and efficient exercise to improve the biomarkers of health that best represent youthfulness, including muscle mass, bone density, body fat percentage, cholesterol/lipid profiles, metabolism, and aerobic capacity.</p></li><li><p class="first">Slow speed strength training is safer, more effective, and more efficient than lifting faster. It's safer because it minimises the effects of momentum and gravity, and allows you to respond immediately to any signals of damage, rather than finding yourself having already pushed through to injury by the time you are aware it is happening. It's more effective and efficient, because it engages all muscle fiber types to their maximum.</p><p><strong>Following this protocol typically takes 15-30 minutes once or twice a week.</strong></p><p>In fact, it is so effective, that trying to workout more often would not allow sufficient rest.</p></li></ol><p>Naturally, I was intrigued and excited by this idea, but at that time there were no facilities in or near Boulder offering this kind of training. I did start a slow lifting free weight routine at home, but what with the myriad things in my life, it was difficult to keep up.</p><p>Not to make excuses, but I do a lot better in the exercise department when I have scheduled commitments, especially with a social component. It's been easier for me to go to a group class of traditional lifting where I know I'll be missed if I don't show up, than to keep to a schedule just for myself in a busy place with constant distractions and demands.</p><p>I also tried doing it at the YMCA using their machines, which worked for a while. Even a schedule to go to the gym with no social component works better for me than staying in the house! Still, it was frustrating, because it took so much trial and error to get the appropriate weight on the machine, and if I got it wrong, I basically blew my chance for the whole week.</p><p>What I really needed was an expert to guide me, who knew how to tell what weight was right and when to increase it, to know which muscle groups to work, to take care of the timing, and to watch my form and focus.</p><p>Last September I decided on a whim to see if any local places had appeared since I last looked, and to my great delight, one had!</p><hr class="docutils" /><p><strong>I've been working with Chuck Bystricky at</strong> <a class="reference external" href="http://informfitness.com/gym-location/boulder-valley-co/">Inform Fitness</a> <strong>since October 2015,</strong><strong>and I couldn't possibly praise him too highly.</strong><strong>He is knowledgable, enthusiastic, and experienced.</strong><strong>He has answered my every question about the protocol or my specific training with as much depth as I desired (and I'm quite the geek).</strong><strong>His passion and sincerity are clear.</strong></p><p><strong>As to my "results", not only do I</strong> <em>feel</em> <strong>stronger,</strong><strong>I have lost some 10 pounds, and am a smaller size than I was last time I was at this weight, a year and a half ago.</strong><strong>I'm going to have to buy new pants, because my current pairs are too loose.</strong><strong>Poor me.</strong></p><hr class="docutils" /><p>Slow lifting is <em>intense</em>! That suits my personality just fine. This quality has led me to start calling it <em>Mindfulness Strength Training</em>.</p><p>Unlike regular lifting I've engaged in before, I can't start my reps and then daydream about something else. It takes a purity of focus to think of nothing except feeling your muscles. It also takes a willingness to keep engaging when the "burn" sets in. It's not exactly painful, but it's not comfortable, either.</p><p>You have to take every exercise of every workout to its fullest. You stretch your ability to its limit. To do otherwise would be a waste of effort. It reminds me of the concept of <a class="reference external" href="http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf">deliberate practice</a>, a method for attaining excellence most studied in the area of music performance.</p><p>I love it. I always leave the studio feeling fantastic.</p><p>Thank you, Chuck.</p></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-90038600355632123772015-12-06T11:54:00.000-08:002015-12-06T15:17:45.506-08:00Toxic Plant of the Day: Cassava Root <div class="document" id="toxic-plant-of-the-day-cassava-root"> <p>Life lives off of life and all living things must defend themselves to survive. Plants, lacking the ability to run, have survived via <a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/2014/01/biochemical-warfare.html">biochemical warfare</a>. This is one reason that, unlike with meat, it's almost always better to eat plants that have been cooked or specially processed than raw, if you choose to eat them at all.</p><p>Starches became important sources of food in populations where the food we evolved to eat, high-fat meat, had been hunted to extinction, or where the culture was driven by surrounding cultures to a small area that could not support them on game alone. However, eating starches involved arduous processing, in order to render them edible. Cassava is no exception.</p><p>Cassava (perhaps better known here as tapioca) is a starchy root. Its defence is cyanide. Like many other plants, the formation of its toxin happens when the plant cells are broken -- that is, it evolved to be triggered by the bite of an insect or other animal. Cassava can be extremely toxic, especially the larger varieties. The toxicity increases under drought conditions. An <b>ounce</b> of a more toxic variety would be enough to kill a rat <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id2" id="id1">[1]</a>.</p><p>The acute response to eating it raw or insufficiently processed is vertigo, vomiting, collapsing, and possibly death. One can only imagine the desperation that we must have undergone to have found a way to eat this after such an effect. The traditional way to circumvent it is prolonged soaking, fermenting, and cooking. Contrary to the new common wisdom, fermenting became a tradition not because our gut bacteria need the resulting bacteria, but because we were using bacteria to process out toxins.</p><p>However, it isn't always done right, and even when it is, it isn't 100% effective. To quote <a class="reference external" href="http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/cassava.htm">some researchers who are trying to genetically modify the plant</a>:</p><p><em>"Chronic, low-level cyanide exposure is associated with the development of goiter and with tropical ataxic neuropathy, a nerve-damaging disorder that renders a person unsteady and uncoordinated. Severe cyanide poisoning, particularly during famines, is associated with outbreaks of a debilitating, irreversible paralytic disorder called Konzo and, in some cases, death. The incidence of Konzo and tropical ataxic neuropathy can be as high as 3 percent in some areas."</em></p><p>In <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3125150/">a paper describing the epidemic of these neurological diseases</a>, it is pointed out that cassava consumption has risen dramatically in the last half century, precisely because it grows well in droughts and poor soil, that condition that increases its toxicity.</p><p><em>"From 1965 to 2000, cassava cultivation in Africa showed an extraordinary increase, from 35 million to 90 million tons, at least partly in response to declining soil fertility and increased cost of inorganic fertilizers. For countries such as DRC, Tanzania, and northern Mozambique, cassava is the most important crop for the largest proportion of farming households [29]–[31]. The amount of labour required for cassava cultivation is considerably less than that for other crops, and this is a major reason for its promotion and increasing use in HIV/AIDS-affected communities [32].</em></p><p><em>Cassava is drought tolerant, grows on poor soils without fertilizer where no other staple can be cultivated, and generates acceptable yields even on depleted and marginal lands. Its roots may be kept in the soil for extended time periods, securing a carbohydrate source in years of agricultural crisis in poor communities, and bridging the seasonal food gap during the hungry and dry season when other crops usually fail [31], [33]. It is no surprise that in times of agricultural crisis, cassava becomes the dominant, and sometimes the only, source of food."</em></p><p>They also point out that the toxic effect is worsened in protein-deficient conditions, because sulfur-rich amino acids (cysteine and methionine) are needed by a detoxifying enzyme in the liver. Animal foods are almost the only sources of these amino acids, though some nuts, spirulina, and soybeans have some.</p><p>Other cyanogenic plants include: hydrangea, flax, lima bean, apple, elderberry, white clover, and corn.</p><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id2" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id1">[1]</a></td><td><a class="reference external" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava">Wikipedia</a> gives the more toxic varieties 1g/kg of cyanogenic glucosides, and says that 25 mg of pure cyanogenic glucides would kill a rat.</td></tr></tbody></table></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-8827654679371033492015-11-29T07:36:00.000-08:002015-12-03T06:43:32.762-08:00Musings on "good" bacteria, antibiotics, and brain function <div class="document" id="good-bacteria-antibiotics-brain-function"> <p>The growing trend recognising that gut bacteria affect all other body systems, the brain, of course, included, is often accompanied by what I think is a faulty assumption. That assumption is that there are healthy strains of bacteria that are difficult to cultivate that we should specifically insert into the gut (through pills, yogurt, or transplants, for example) and then keep alive by feeding with high fiber plants in order to maintain health.</p><p>The main reason I find this implausible is that it's not evolutionarily supported. There is just no strong evidence that evolving humans ate fibrous plants with any regularity. Moreover, any gut bacteria that we can't easily keep living inside us seem unlikely to have evolved there. It makes no sense that regularly eating something we didn't evolve to eat regularly, to keep alive something that doesn't appear to have evolved a strong penchant to stay alive in us, would be the only, let alone best way to maintain an inner environment conducive to health.</p><p>There do seem to be positive effects from taking probiotics, but I question the interpretation of that. One hypothesis I have is that the main benefit of probiotics is that they in turn displace <em>worse</em> strains of bacteria. If this is correct, then another, possibly better solution may be to minimise the worse bacteria by not feeding them. One way to not feed them would be to <em>avoid</em> fibrous plants.</p><p>(Please see my <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ketotic.org/2013/11/similarities-between-germ-free-mice-and.html">related post on germ-free mice</a>, where I show that mice with no gut bacteria, contrary to common interpretation, are healthier than those with bacteria.)</p><p>Another possible explanation, is that these bacteria we are pushing mainly help people digest fibrous plants. So in people who eat fibrous plants, it is better to work to maintain these bacteria, than not to. However, this, too has the obvious alternative solution.</p><div class="section" id="antibiotics-and-the-brain"><h3>Antibiotics and the brain</h3><p>I just learned about <a class="reference external" href="http://www.microbecolhealthdis.net/index.php/mehd/article/view/26382">the potential benefits of antibiotics in autism</a>. The author of the linked article has found evidence that negative symptoms of autism may be mitigated by taking antibiotics. His own son, for example, had improved eye contact, speech, energy, and motor control. This prompted him to look for clinical evidence, and he did find some preliminary such.</p><p>Some antibiotics appear to improve brain function. Animal studies have shown cognitive improvements in, for example, mouse models of <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17884273">schizophrenia</a>, and <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4085054/">Alzheimer's</a>. The mechanisms are unclear.</p><p>Often researchers suppose that such properties of antibiotics are coincidental, and unrelated to the antibiotic effects. For example, minocycline, the antibiotic used in the latter study, has been shown to have <a class="reference external" href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-4159.2005.03219.x/pdf">antioxidant properties that are neuroprotective</a>. The mechanism is unknown, and I am not aware of people testing the hypothesis that the antioxidant property is a downstream effect of bacterial modulation.</p><p>I did find one nice exception to this. Antibiotics are known to improve cognition in hepatic encephalopathy. In <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3615021/">this study</a>, the researchers tried to discover a plausible mechanism for that. What they found was that there was a shift in the activity of different gut bacteria, resulting in an increase of many types of fatty acids in the blood. They speculated that these fatty acids, which brains like to use, were reponsible for the cognitive improvements.</p><p>Antibiotics often get a bad rap, because some conditions appear to get worse after you take them. People explain this with the story that after you've taken them, your gut is now prey to the "bad" bacteria, which for some reason never explained, naturally takes over in place of the "good" bacteria that "should" be there. This all appears rather backwards to me. I would think that if we were feeding our guts naturally, we wouldn't have to go out of our way to ensure this didn't happen.</p><p>What is salient to me is that supressing our gut bacteria, or changing the way they function from the default, is often having a positive effect that goes away when we go back to our normal way of treating those bacteria -- feeding them our Western diets. The common wisdom for dealing with that is to force in bacteria optimised for an onslaught of plant fiber. One wonders what would happen if instead, we just stopped the onslaught.</p></div></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-24655665538451752062015-11-05T14:11:00.000-08:002015-11-05T14:23:37.348-08:00On Happiness <div class="document" id="on-happiness"> <p>This post is not my usual fare. It's personal and it's not even about meat.</p><p>In the spring of 2014, many things were coming together for me. Areas that had been stuck were moving forward, particularly in my intellectual / career life. My love life was improving, too, though there were still important difficulties. The most exciting thing of all was that I had found, applied to, and been admitted to the <a class="reference external" href="https://www.recurse.com/">Recurse Center</a>, a computer science program in New York City.</p><p>I arrived there in the beginning of June for the happiest three months of my life before or since. I was living independently in a tiny dorm room in Manhattan just north of Houston. It had few amenities, and only shared bathrooms. Yet I loved it. It was a 15 minute walk to the Recurse Center. I loved to start and end my days with a refreshing walk through the city, and despite its reputation, I found the people I passed to be radiating good cheer.</p><p>I always arrived at the Center early to gather my thoughts about what I learned the previous day, and set my focus for the day ahead. I programmed, read tutorials, went to presentations, and wrote about what I was doing every day as an exercise in transparency. I stayed until bedtime. I felt independent, free, creative, and competent, and I attributed it all to New York and the Recurse Center.</p><p>A miraculous thing happened. Halfway though the program I met an extraordinary person with whom I fell madly, helplessly in love. I hadn't been looking for love. Love was the furthest thing from my mind, because I was focused on my creativity, and was too happy to want for anything. But finding it took me to new heights of joy.</p><p>When I returned to Boulder, I returned to unhappiness, and I believed it was situational. You see, I'd been practising resentment and blame for my life circumstances for years, for everything from the geographical location I was unhappy with, to my professional stagnation, to the mundane responsibilities of life. This was so unlike me. I have long believed that if something was worth doing, it was worth doing well, and more than that—it was worth actually enjoying it! I believed that having made a choice of action, one should take it on as fully as possible, putting in all of one's heart. But I wasn't doing that, and I hadn't been for some time.</p><p>I was making a big mistake. I was letting circumstances dictate my happiness. Now don't get me wrong. I am a material being. There is nothing more spiritual than taking delight in the present reality of the material world. It was good to allow New York City and the Recurse Center to fill me with happiness. It was right to take pleasure in my friend and lover, Sean Baker, who touched me more deeply than I've ever been touched, physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and with whom I have shared the most intimate of moments over fine things and crass things alike.</p><p>The mistake was to depend on these things for my happiness. If I can be happy in a dorm not much larger than my current bathroom, then I can find joy in Boulder, Colorado. In fact, it has surely been a continuous effort not to enjoy such a beautiful city, an effort that was worse than a waste. Today I talked to a man who moved here but two weeks ago from L.A., and instead of launching into my caveats and complaints, I simply told him what I liked about it, and I meant it.</p><p>The biggest mistake of all was to depend on my lover for happiness, for in him I saw my only salvation from the rest of it. So I forwent nearly everthing else I loved, in order to spend every possible moment with him, so as to bask in my delight of him, to get my happiness from him. This was not only unfair, but just plain backwards. The whole reason we were able to connect in the first place, was because I was radiating joy. I had something to give. I was fun and easy and emotionally self-sufficient, and the point of being together was to mutually amplify our joy into more joy. If I want to be happy, all I need to do is embrace my creative desires, surround myself with things that give me pleasure, and be the amazing person I know I am in my heart. And then, like during my stay at the Recurse Center, I will be happy, independent, free, and a magnet for miracles.</p></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-54400786329654389192015-01-31T10:03:00.000-08:002015-01-31T10:03:48.403-08:00Mass Action <div class="document" id="mass-action"> <p>I've started reading Dr. Richard D. Feinman's book, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Turned-Upside-Down/dp/0979201829/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0">The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution</a>. It may be the best book on the topic of low carb diets to date, because of its broad perspective, and its readability. It appears to have at its core the same thesis Zooko and I have been trying to promote on <a class="reference external" href="www.ketotic.org">our website</a>, that low carbohydrate diets are good for health in many ways, particularly in ways connected to metabolic syndrome. In the book, Dr. Feinman expresses a problem that comes with that discovery, a problem which has caused us much personal frustration:</p><!-- --><blockquote>"[T]he problem with convincing people of the benefits of a reduced carbohydrate strategy is that it appears to be good for everything, good for what ails you. You can sound like a hard-sell pitchman." (p 204)</blockquote><p>Another passage that particularly struck me was in the introduction. It has given me vocabulary for a concept we've tried to express several times.</p><!-- --><blockquote>"[B]iology tends to run on hormones and enzymes, that is, control mechanisms, <strong>not on mass action</strong> (the principle that chemical processes are determined by how much reactants are put into them). The grand principle in biochemistry is that there is hardly anything that is not connected with feedback." (p 7, <em>Emphasis ours</em>)</blockquote><p>This point was made in the context of the <em>diet-heart hypothesis</em>, which has as a premise that you can control the amount of cholesterol in your blood by how much of it you eat (which is untrue). It is an equally appropriate concept when talking about the calorie control method for weight loss. That method is generally a lost cause, because the important mechanisms in weight control are hormonal. How much you eat is a downstream <em>effect</em> of your hormonal state.</p><div class="section" id="protein-does-not-affect-ketosis-via-mass-action"><h3>Protein does not affect ketosis via mass action</h3><p>It also explains well the idea Zooko and I have tried to put forth about protein and gluconeogenesis (<em>GNG</em>, the process of making sugar out of protein). We showed in <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ketotic.org/2012/08/if-you-eat-excess-protein-does-it-turn.html">this post</a> that the amount of material available for GNG doesn't appear to have any effect on how much GNG actually occurs. Insofar as eating a high amount of protein can lead to reduced ketosis, which would then require your body to get more energy from glucose, which could increase demand for GNG, this must occur through a hormonal/enzymatic cascade.</p><p>That would mean that managing ketosis is not a simple matter of calculating some threshold of protein, after which the rest "turns into sugar", any more than managing weight is a simple matter of calculating some threshold of calories, after which the rest "turns into fat".</p><p>Most people find that if they restrict carbohydrate intake, excess fat is lost. The loss of fat entails a caloric deficit, but that is an effect of the fat loss, not a cause. One could argue about what would happen if people on low carb diets consumed excess calories, but it's largely irrelevant, because people on low carb diets following their hunger rarely do that.</p><p>The same may be true of protein. As far as I can tell, most people on a very low carb diet are in ketosis without consciously constraining their protein consumption. It happens naturally.</p><p>While I have heard from some people who need to manually manage calories or protein to stay in their therapeutic zone, even while on a very low carb diet, it doesn't seem to be the common case. Even in those cases, I have often seen the problem resolve when a high-fat, plant-free, sweetener-free approach is taken. This suggests that there are further (hormonal/enzymatic) mechanisms that can interfere with the hunger feedback loop.</p><!-- Too much protein, or too little fat? ==================================== An exception to this would be in people who are afraid or unwilling to eat enough fat. In that case, when they get close to ideal body fat levels, and they need more energy from food, they would start to feel symptoms of starvation. However, just eating more protein will not alleviate starvation symptoms. The name for what happens when people eat only protein is `rabbit starvation <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation>`_. I hypothesise that when people conclude that they "need carbs" to feel good, they are simply not eating enough fat. Fat is so foreign to our current culture, that people don't tend to eat it as food. --></div></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-81073462579185083322015-01-18T11:10:00.000-08:002015-01-18T11:10:40.036-08:00The mystery of hippopotamus fat <div class="document" id="the-mystery-of-hippopotamus-fat"> <p>A friend recently drew my attention to <a class="reference external" href="http://www.wired.com/2013/12/hippopotamus-ranching/">an historical essay about a plan to bring hippos to the U.S. primarily for eating</a>. Unfortunately, that plan never came to fruition. Hippos are one of the fatter animals left, endangered because their meat is so prized, and I wonder why we don't just farm them.</p><p>In any case, I was curious about eating hippopotamus, and found an interesting section on hippopotamus fat in <a class="reference external" href="http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Paleoanthropology_and_Archaeology_of.html?id=5fXSjwEACAAJ">The Paleoanthropology and Archaeology of Big-Game Hunting: Protein, Fat, or Politics?</a>.</p><!-- --><blockquote><p>As is evident from some of the previous quotes, the hippo, like the eland, was clearly highly prized for its fat (e.g. Andersson 1857:414; St. Gibbons 1898:9). While hippos may have been too difficult and too dangerous for Paleolithic hunters to kill, it is perhaps not surprising that (presumably) scavenged hippo remains, with clearly cutmarked bones, often show up in some of our earliest archeological sites in East Africa, such as the famous <em>HAS</em> ("Hippo and Artefact") Site immortalised in a stamp issued jointly in 1975 by Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda (see Fug. 4.4; Isaac and Harris 1997; for additional early cases, see also Bunn 1994; Clark 1987; Fiore et al. 2004; Harmand et al. 2009; Johanson and Wong 2009:255; Leakey 1996:70-71; Plummer et al. 1999;Pobiner et al. 2008).</p><p>William Burchell in 1822 provides a concise but useful description of hippo fat, noting its quantity and its somewhat unusually low melting point:</p><blockquote><p><em>The ribs [of the hippo] are covered with a thick layer of fat, celebrated as the greatest delicacy; and known to the colonists as a rarity by the name of `Zeekoe-spek' (Seacow-pork). This can only be preserved by salting; as, on attempting to dry it in the sun in the same manner as other parts of the animal, it melts away. The rest of the flesh consists entirely of lean; and was, as usual with all other game, cut into large slices, and dried on the bushes; reserving only enough for present use.</em></p><p>Burchell(1822:411)</p></blockquote><p>Schweinfurth's (1978) interesting narrative provides additional insights into the amount of fat that one can obtain from a single hippo carcass; he also comments on the low melting point of the fat, noting additionally that the fat does not go rancid easily:</p><blockquote><p><em>We were hard at work on the following day in turning the huge carcass of the hippopotamus to account for our domestic use. My people boiled down great flasks of the fat which they took from the layers between the ribs, but what the entire produce of grease would have been I was unable to determine, as hundreds of natives had already cut off and appropriated pieces of the flesh. When it is boiled, hippopotamus fat is very similar to pork-lard, though in the warm climate of Central Africa it never attains a consistency firmer than that of oil. Of all animal fats it appears to be the purest, and at any rate never becomes rancid, and will keep for many years without requiring any special process of clarifying....</em></p><p>Schweinfurth (1878:192)</p></blockquote></blockquote><!-- Reginald Charles Fulke Maugham provides an estimate of the actual quantity of fat that one could expect to obain from an adult hippo carcass: *The great carcase yields a large quantity of excellent fat, which is much prized for cooking purposes. It is wholly free from any unpleasant flavour or odour, and very similar in appearance and consistency to that of the ox. A full-grown animal in good condition would probably yield considerably more than cwt. [centum weight or hundredweigh, ~50 kg] of this valuable substance.* Maugham (1906:167) Dane (1921:75), another experienced "sport" hunter, also notes that: "the hippo and the eland appear to be the only animals in Africa which have any fat, and the three hippos we shot provided a series of banquets, which were much appreciated." --><p>I then became curious about the composition of hippopotamus fat. What could make it both have a low melting point and be resistant to rancidity? Generally, the more saturated a fat is, the more solid it is (that is, the higher a melting point), but at the same time, the more stable it is — the <em>less</em> it is susceptible to rancidity, because it can't be easily oxidised. So how could hippopotamus fat be both very liquid, and very stable?</p><p>I eventually found <a class="reference external" href="http://www.jlr.org/content/5/3/363.full.pdf">a paper which gives the composition of the fat of a variety of even-toed (cloven-hoofed) animals</a>. I was perplexed, because hippo fat appears to be almost the same as beef, and although it has a little more oleic acid and a little less <em>stearic</em> <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id4" id="id1">[*]</a>, which should make it slightly less solid than beef tallow, it should still be firmer than <a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/2013/04/on-lard-from-gary-taubes.html">lard</a>, which has even more oleic and less stearic.</p><p>Hope temporarily returned when I realised what the point of the paper was, and I learned something new to me. Fat is usually in the form of a <em>triglyceride</em>. It's called that because it consists of three fatty acids held together by a glycerol "backbone". The thing I hadn't read about or thought about before, is that the properties of triglycerides depend not just on which fatty acids are in them, but what <em>position</em> they are in the triglyceride. There appears to be a whole industry built around that. For example, now that consumers avoid hydrogenated oils, but still think they should avoid saturated fat, and still want something spreadable, engineers have discovered they can make vegetable oils more solid by manipulating the position of fatty acids within triglycerides <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id5" id="id2">[†]</a>.</p><p>Nonetheless, looking at the table in the paper <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id6" id="id3">[‡]</a>, not only is the proportion fatty acids in hippo fat similar to beef, so is the distribution of those fats into the middle position of the triglyceride. So, the mystery isn't solved that way. I don't know what to think.</p><p>Another friend pointed out that there are <a class="reference external" href="http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27905743">feral hippos in Columbia that no one knows what to do with</a>. <strong>I have an idea...</strong></p><hr class="docutils" /><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id4" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id1">[*]</a></td><td>'Stearic' comes from one of the many different Greek words for fat (as important as snow to the Inuit): στεαρ (stear): 'hard fat', whereas 'oleic' probably comes from ελαιον (elaion): 'oil'. See <a class="reference external" href="http://www.jlr.org/content/25/13/1430.full.pdf">The lore of lipids, by Lewis Gidez, in the Journal of Lipid Research 1984 Dec 15;25(13):1430-6</a></td></tr></tbody></table><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id5" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id2">[†]</a></td><td><p class="first">Here is a fascinating review of the effects of these 'interesterification' manipulations:</p><div class="last line-block"><div class="line"><a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1947992/">Effects of stereospecific positioning of fatty acids in triacylglycerol structures in native and randomized fats: a review of their nutritional implications</a></div><div class="line">Tilakavati Karupaiah1 and Kalyana Sundramcorresponding author</div><div class="line">Nutr Metab (Lond). 2007; 4: 16.</div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id6" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id3">[‡]</a></td><td><p class="first"><em>The fatty acid numbers represent chain length and number of double bonds (places where hydrogen could attach), i.e. 0 means saturated, 1 means monounsaturated, and &gt;1 means polyunsaturated. The corresponding names are fatty acid names are:</em></p><table border="1" class="docutils"><colgroup><col width="14%" /><col width="14%" /><col width="14%" /><col width="14%" /><col width="14%" /><col width="14%" /><col width="14%" /></colgroup><thead valign="bottom"><tr><th class="head">14:0</th><th class="head">16:0</th><th class="head">18:0</th><th class="head">16:1</th><th class="head">18:1</th><th class="head">18:2</th><th class="head">18:3</th></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td>mystiric</td><td>palmitic</td><td>stearic</td><td>palmitoleic</td><td>oleic</td><td>linoleic</td><td>α-linolenic</td></tr></tbody></table><p>"The fatty acid distribution in the triglycerides of these various fats is shown in Table 1. For each fat, the first line gives the composition of the whole triglyceride, the second line gives the composition of the fatty acids in the 2-position of the triglyceride, and the third line (Proportion) reports the percentage of each fatty acid that is in the 2-position. If a fatty acid is randomly distributed among all three positions in the triglyceride molecule, the proportion value will be 33%. The occasional proportion value that is in excess of 100% is attributable to the large relative error where a fatty acid is present in very small amounts."</p><div class="figure"><img alt="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-jaxhTDj3p-Q/VLv2pn150wI/AAAAAAAAJrw/sH2aOt9UK0k/w308-h565-no/sn2fat.png" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-jaxhTDj3p-Q/VLv2pn150wI/AAAAAAAAJrw/sH2aOt9UK0k/w308-h565-no/sn2fat.png" style="width: 100%;" /></div><p class="last">For more tables of the composition of fats and their second-position fatty acids in a variety plants and animals, see: <a class="reference external" href="http://lipidlibrary.aocs.org/Lipids/tag1/index.htm">TRIACYLGLYCEROLS PART 1. STRUCTURE AND COMPOSITION</a></p></td></tr></tbody></table></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-90171808592978696752015-01-03T10:35:00.000-08:002015-01-03T13:28:14.776-08:00Dear Lyle McDonald, <div class="document" id="dear-lyle-mcdonald"> <p>I read your <a class="reference external" href="http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/uncategorized/an-open-apology-to-the-internet.html/">Open Apology to the Internet</a> yesterday. You are courageous to talk about it, and my heart goes out to you. Although I don't know exactly what trouble you've gotten yourself into, I know the pain of Bipolar II, because I have it. Or I <em>had</em> it. Words get a bit tricky, and I have written an entire essay on <a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/2014/01/being-having-and-doing-metaphysics-of.html">whether someone has a disease or not when they show no symptoms</a> .</p><p><em>I have no symptoms of bipolar</em> and have been completely off of medication since I started my current diet. How I stumbled upon what has been my cure was sort of an accident, but having a strong background in ketogenic diets played a role, and much of my expertise, at least in the beginning, was given to me by you, Lyle.</p><p>You probably don't know of me, but of course I know of you. I read your work in the late 90's while playing around with the CKD. Later, in 2002, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0967145600/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0967145600&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=theketdieforh-20&amp;linkId=AYCVPNI6TP3EY7WY">The Ketogenic Diet</a> was out of print and very hard to get, but Zooko somehow procured me a copy, presenting it to me on the occasion of our second wedding anniversary. I studied it carefully.</p><p>Lowering carbs always helped my mood, and there are many plausible reasons to believe that a ketogenic diet might treat bipolar (see below), but a ketogenic diet by itself didn't cure my disease, and didn't prevent it from progressing.</p><div class="section" id="progressing"><h3>Progressing</h3><p>As you say, bipolar progresses. And one thing that may catalyse the progression is antidepressants. From <a class="reference external" href="http://www.psycheducation.org/bipolar/controversy.htm">PsychEducation.org</a>, an excellent resource on Bipolar II:</p><!-- --><blockquote><p>That antidepressants can cause "switching", bringing on a manic or hypomanic phase, is generally accepted, although how often this occurs is still hotly debated (somewhere between 4% and 40% of the time?).</p><p>However, antidepressants may pose bigger risks in the long term. Substantial evidence suggests that antidepressants can induce "rapid cycling". Indeed, it is a standard recommendation for the treatment of rapid cycling to gradually withdraw any antidepressant. In addition, more subtle "destabilizing" effects are possible. Antidepressants may make it more difficult to get a good outcome from an otherwise effective mood stabilizer treatment. There is even a concern that antidepressants may permanently alter the course of a person's bipolar illness, through a phenomenon called "kindling".</p></blockquote><p>I feel strongly that my hypomanias were related to my extensive use of antidepressants.</p></div><div class="section" id="a-hijacked-brain"><h3>A hijacked brain</h3><p>You described bipolar as having a hijacked brain. This is exactly my experience.</p><p>Last summer I gave a lightning talk at <a class="reference external" href="http://www.hope.net/">HOPE X</a> on exactly this. (Unfortunately, it was not recorded.) I compared bipolar disorder to having your brain hacked.</p><p>I argued that mood states in bipolar act like drugs in <a class="reference external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory">state dependent learning</a>. For example, when I had periodic bouts of anger (which increased in frequency as time went on), it was very easy to remember all the things I had been thinking about last time I was angry. <em>It gave the illusion of continuity; that my entire life was one constant stream of things making me angry.</em></p><p>But I had multiple moods, and my beliefs about life in different states were beginning to diverge from each other, based on this contrast in the strength of memory of evidence. I knew this was happening, but it created a dilemma: Do I act on what I think I might believe later, or what I believe now? To whom am I loyal — myself now, or the self I know I will be later?</p><p>Specifically, what should I do when in that state in which I know that life is not worth living, because my whole life, it seems then, has been one long stream of futility? I chose to be loyal to a future self, in that case. But there is no doubt that betraying yourself in the now because you lack trust in your own brain is a shitty place to be.</p></div><div class="section" id="the-future"><h3>The future</h3><p>You have a life to recreate, and consequences to bear, but I have faith in you. It is not easy to be creative and highly intelligent in that bipolar way, because you will discover truths that other people can't see, and thus have to deal with the constant criticism of wrong people, sometimes very intelligent wrong people. You have been through this and are obviously strong, even if we couldn't see all that was going on.</p><p>Turn your natural abilities and your strength to curing yourself as best you can. What worked for me might work for you! I hope you <a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/p/eat-meat-not-too-little-mostly-fat.html">try it</a> and it does. But if you don't or if it doesn't then I think you will find a way. Study the drugs (many modern bipolar drugs are anti-convulsants, suggesting that what helps epilepsy might help bipolar). Study the physiology. You already know way more than I do. Look at plausible fringe theories (some interesting things to be found on the site I mentioned above). You will find something, and your life will get better.</p></div><div class="section" id="my-own-apology"><h3>My own apology</h3><p>I hope you take this letter as I intend it: as an expression of care, sympathy, and of hope that perhaps what I have learned could help you in some way. Please forgive my boldness to speak to you personally when I don't know you, or all of what you are going through.</p><p>Most of all, I just want to say that I admire you for your openness, your willingness to admit to mistakes, and your commitment to change.</p><p>With love and encouragement,</p><p><em>Amber</em></p></div><hr class="docutils" /><div class="section" id="resources"><h3>Resources</h3><p><a class="reference external" href="http://www.psycheducation.org/index.html">Jim Phelps' Bipolar II site</a></p><p>Some papers that might be of use:</p><ul class="simple"><li><a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11918434">The ketogenic diet may have mood-stabilizing properties.</a>El-Mallakh RS, Paskitti ME. Med Hypotheses. 2001 Dec;57(6):724-6.</li><li><a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14769484">The ketogenic diet; fatty acids, fatty acid-activated receptors and neurological disorders.</a>Prostaglandins Leukot Essent Fatty Acids. 2004 Mar;70(3):253-64. Cullingford TE.</li><li><a class="reference external" href="http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-59259-808-3_12">Potential Applications of the Ketogenic Diet in Disorders Other Than Epilepsy</a>Rif S. El-Mallakh Epilepsy and the Ketogenic Diet Nutrition and Health 2004, pp 153-159</li><li><a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1940242/">The neuropharmacology of the ketogenic diet.</a>Pediatr Neurol. 2007 May;36(5):281-92. Hartman AL1, Gasior M, Vining EP, Rogawski MA.</li><li><a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2649682/">The neuroprotective properties of calorie restriction, the ketogenic diet, and ketone bodies.</a>Brain Res Rev. 2009 Mar;59(2):293-315. doi: 10.1016/j.brainresrev.2008.09.002. Epub 2008 Sep 25. Maalouf M1, Rho JM, Mattson MP.</li><li><a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2652467/">Schizophrenia, gluten, and low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diets: a case report and review of the literature</a>Nutr Metab (Lond). 2009; 6: 10. Bryan D Kraft and Eric C Westman</li><li><a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23030231">The ketogenic diet for type II bipolar disorder.</a>Neurocase. 2013;19(5):423-6. doi: 10.1080/13554794.2012.690421. Epub 2012 Oct 3. Phelps JR1, Siemers SV, El-Mallakh RS.</li></ul></div></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-25819219329535342472014-11-11T20:52:00.000-08:002014-11-16T15:38:48.735-08:00Experiences of a five-year carnivore: Part II <div class="document" id="experiences-of-a-five-year-carnivore"> <style>.strike { text-decoration: line-through; } </style><div class="section" id="part-ii-eating-then-and-now"><h3>Part II: Eating, then and now</h3><p><a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/2014/11/experiences-of-five-year-carnivore-part.html">When I first was thinking about trying an all-meat diet (Part I)</a>, I worried about things like boredom, and missing favourite plants. In practice this hasn't been a problem, because...</p></div><div class="section" id="my-concept-of-what-constitutes-food-has-changed"><h3>...my concept of what constitutes food has changed.</h3><p>You may have have experienced this if you don't normally eat "processed" foods <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id5" id="id1">[1]</a>, and then are offered some blue, grocery-store-birthday-cake monstrosity, or "fruit" punch. It's about as appealing as plastic.</p><p>When I started out, I avoided all spices, and ate plain meat. It was a little bland the first few days, but my tastes quickly adapted to animal foods. Even though <a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/2012/11/are-vegetables-good-for-you.html">I have always loved vegetables</a>, I don't miss them. I can see that they are pretty, and I can imagine their sweetness or texture if pressed, but it's really no big deal.</p><span style="width: 400px; float: right; text-align: center; border-top: 3px solid #000; border-bottom: 3px solid #000; padding: 10px; margin: 5px 5px 15px 15px; background-color: #FFFFFF;"><iframe width="320" height="180" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/pISqdhgvFrE?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><br /><i><b>Amber eats chicken bones<b></b></b></i></span><!-- https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-ZdTDskNgQyY/VBOAMTdqVBI/AAAAAAAAF-U/cMPBdLlfhyU/w270-h480-no/VID_20140912_172145.mp4 <img alt="https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=pISqdhgvFrE" src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=pISqdhgvFrE" style="width: 128px;" /><p class="caption"><strong>Amber eats chicken bones.</strong></p> --></div><div class="section" id="perhaps-unsurprisingly-i-started-appreciating-meat-more"><h3>Perhaps unsurprisingly, I started appreciating meat more.</h3><p>I've always <em>liked</em> meat, but I eat meat differently from when I started. The first thing that happened was that I started liking it cooked more rare. Brought up vegetarian, I'd learned pride in my palate for the exotic, but I was not a connoisseur of flesh. I preferred my steak well-done. When meat was the only thing I ate, I began to notice that I liked it more rare, sometimes even raw, though admittedly, I don't eat raw often.</p><p>I also eat all the fat and gristle, and as much of the bone as I can chew, and marrow as I can access, but this has always been the case. A trick I have learned on that front, is that boiling bones results not only in delicious broth, but often in bones that are soft enough to simply eat.</p><!-- https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-ZdTDskNgQyY/VBOAMTdqVBI/AAAAAAAAF-U/cMPBdLlfhyU/w270-h480-no/VID_20140912_172145.mp4 --></div><div class="section" id="changes-in-fat-intake"><h3>Changes in fat intake</h3><p>When I started out, I ate fatty cuts, and I sometimes added fat in the form of butter, and later (though not now) coconut oil <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id6" id="id2">[2]</a>. When I measured, the fat-to-protein ratio was usually at about 65:35 — 70:30. But back then I had a lot of excess body fat, which I was losing at a good pace. So the true ratio, from a metabolic perspective, was actually higher.</p><blockquote class="pull-quote"><em>If you hear the argument that a carnivorous diet is too relatively high in protein to be ketogenic, remember that if you are losing fat, that fat counts toward your consumption.</em></blockquote><div class="section" id="after-my-weight-stabilised-i-started-wanting-even-more-fat"><h4>After my weight stabilised, I started wanting even more fat.</h4><p>This was a gradual process. At first, I started drinking more in my coffee. I had been ordering occasional lattés made with heavy cream, and butter melted in, since the early days, when a fellow carnivore suggested it. This was before the days of <a href="https://www.bulletproofexec.com/how-to-make-your-coffee-bulletproof-and-your-morning-too/">Bulletproof Coffee (BPC)</a>. When BPC started trending, I <strike>butchered it</strike> made it my own by blending butter and coconut oil along with heavy cream into my coffee at home.</p><p>At the beginning of this year, I reported that <a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/2014/01/recent-changes.html">I had all but stopped eating cream, butter, and coconut oil, in favour of lard</a>. As I mentioned in that post, I've also been drinking cups of blended, fatty, homemade broth <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id7" id="id3">[3]</a>, liberally salted. It emulsifies to a thick cream, just like BPC, but it's just animal fat, and the minerals extracted from the bones, along with small amounts of collagen, and related proteins. It feels more nourishing to me.</p></div><div class="section" id="before-and-after-blending-broth"><h4>Before and after blending broth.</h4><div class="figure"><img alt="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1hYTPmBK6ZM/VGK8dZJNxtI/AAAAAAAAHXI/K7gfTZgZe7U/w879-h580-no/broth-before-after.jpg" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1hYTPmBK6ZM/VGK8dZJNxtI/AAAAAAAAHXI/K7gfTZgZe7U/w879-h580-no/broth-before-after.jpg" style="width: 300px;" /></div><p>Over the summer, another carnivorous friend taught me how to make beautifully clear, pure bacon drippings by cooking bacon in the oven in a glass pan. It comes out so mild and creamy that I have been eating it not merely as a spread, but by itself on a spoon.</p></div><div class="section" id="oven-bacon-and-drippings"><h4>Oven bacon and drippings.</h4><div class="figure"><img alt="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-uXYQkxzPmUU/VGK8c4i9KRI/AAAAAAAAHW8/zMqbYlYQQKs/w916-h316-no/glassbacon-and-drippings.jpg" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-uXYQkxzPmUU/VGK8c4i9KRI/AAAAAAAAHW8/zMqbYlYQQKs/w916-h316-no/glassbacon-and-drippings.jpg" style="width: 400px;" /></div><span style="width: 200px; float: right; text-align: center; border-top: 3px solid #000; border-bottom: 3px solid #000; padding: 10px; margin: 5px 5px 15px 15px; background-color: #FFFFFF;"><img alt="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-_gvpv_5lnvo/VGK8c0ypXJI/AAAAAAAAHXA/SX3rrMv9-Ng/w498-h580-no/tallow-spoon-cropped.jpg" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-_gvpv_5lnvo/VGK8c0ypXJI/AAAAAAAAHXA/SX3rrMv9-Ng/w498-h580-no/tallow-spoon-cropped.jpg" style="width: 128px;" /><p class="caption"><strong>I am the candle. See me glow.</strong></p></span><p>He also introduced me to tallow as a food. I had no idea that tallow was so delicious. (It's best at room temperature.) I also find that the satiety I get from eating tallow is superior to any of butter, coconut oil, or even bacon drippings.</p><blockquote class="pull-quote"><em>An acquaintance seeing me eat tallow, said that people make candles out of tallow. I am the candle. See me glow.</em></blockquote><p>These days, my total fat intake is more than it has been in previous years (once I stopped getting much from my own stores). The superior satiety effect I am getting also seems to be resulting in eating less protein generally, an effect I didn't personally experience with the BPC approach <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id8" id="id4">[4]</a>.</p></div></div><div class="section" id="a-typical-day"><h3>A typical day</h3><p><a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/2012/08/my-carnivorous-diet.html">Last time I described my eating</a> was two years ago. At that time I mentioned having occasional pickles, baker's chocolate, or sashimi garnish. I rarely do that these days. It simply appeals less.</p><p>My appetite is stimulated by the presence of (what I consider) food even if I'm not hungry. That is, if I walk into a kitchen where bacon or steak is frying, I'm likely to want to eat it, and often will. However, if left to my own devices, this is the pattern I have been falling into lately.</p><ul><li><p class="first">Throughout the morning, I alternate cups of black coffee with cups of blended broth. The broth is usually made from bones from roasts, though I also buy beef bones. If it is not sufficiently fatty, I may add bacon drippings or butter.</p></li><li><p class="first">Sometime in the afternoon, I often (but not always) start feeling hungry, and I will usually respond to this by eating some tallow, possibly followed by some cold leftovers from the previous meal.</p></li><li><p class="first">Supper is usually one or two of these:</p><ul class="simple"><li>roast beef, leg of lamb, pork shoulder, or chicken thighs</li><li>broiled or fried fish, pork or lamb shoulder chops, or steaks.</li><li>hamburgers, or fried pieces of fat trimmings, if I can get them from the meat counter.</li></ul><p>I usually eat more tallow or lard with the leaner bites of these.</p></li><li><p class="first">Every few weeks I get a hankering for liver, and eat that for a day or two until it no longer appeals.</p></li><li><p class="first">I also keep a supply of homemade jerky on hand, in case I feel like nibbling while I wait for something to cook.</p></li></ul><div class="figure"><img alt="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-ReNlEAbMCCk/VGKL9_wbsPI/AAAAAAAAHWI/8DJtM3LxYtM/w773-h580-no/IMG_20140925_075924.jpg" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-ReNlEAbMCCk/VGKL9_wbsPI/AAAAAAAAHWI/8DJtM3LxYtM/w773-h580-no/IMG_20140925_075924.jpg" style="width: 300px;" /><p class="caption"><strong>A recent breakfast: espresso, chicken broth, bacon drippings, and a little bacon.</strong></p></div></div><div class="section" id="footnotes"><h3>Footnotes:</h3><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id5" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id1">[1]</a></td><td><p class="first">Let's face it: almost all foods we eat are "processed". It's about as meaningless a phrase as "chemicals", or "real" in "Just Eat Real Food". What I mean here is a food product that is made by isolating specific components, usually from plants, in a way that typically couldn't be done by hand, studying chemistry until you can figure out how to mix them back together so they stay solid, and calling it "food". Think Twinkie.</p><img alt="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5dZrrSqRENs/VGK8oASsOFI/AAAAAAAAHXc/K7nC66V_aoI/w251-h201-no/twinkie-ingredients.jpeg" class="last" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5dZrrSqRENs/VGK8oASsOFI/AAAAAAAAHXc/K7nC66V_aoI/w251-h201-no/twinkie-ingredients.jpeg" /></td></tr></tbody></table><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id6" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id2">[2]</a></td><td><p class="first">Coconut oil is a plant, it turns out. I used it because it has a favourable fat profile: lots of saturates and monounsaturates. It even has medium chain triglycerides, which are known to be ketogenic, even under <em>glycolytic</em> (sugar metabolism) conditions. It also has a nice flavour, especially in coffee (my plant vice).</p><p class="last">However, I had suspected it might be contributing to my rosacea, which has been in almost complete remission since I started carnivory. Coconut has salicylates, which may be incriminated in rosacea for me. This summer I went without it for a long time, and when I had it at last again, my face immediately flushed.</p></td></tr></tbody></table><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id7" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id3">[3]</a></td><td>[<em>Added 2014-11-16</em>] To make broth, I just take the leftover carcass from a roast, throw it in a crock pot with water, and let it simmer for about one and a half to two days. I don't add anything else to it. Sometimes instead of leftovers, I buy beef bones, or shank. I have yet to try fish heads, but it's on my list.</td></tr></tbody></table><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id8" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id4">[4]</a></td><td>I haven't measured this. As much of my food is broth or whole cuts of meat, it is hard to get high accuracy on fat and protein intake. However, my ketosis readings would confirm this perception. More on that in an upcoming post.</td></tr></tbody></table><!-- `Bulletproof Coffee (BPC)`_: https://www.bulletproofexec.com/bulletproof-coffee-recipe --></div></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com66tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-72631837413302260532014-11-04T17:17:00.000-08:002014-11-05T08:08:30.628-08:00The ketogenic diet as the default human diet: an energy perspective <div class="document" id="the-ketogenic-diet-as-the-default-human-diet-an-energy-perspective"> <!-- *This article explains my current understanding of how ketogenic diets are good for energy, how carbohydrate based diets are counter-productive for energy, and how these observations suggest that humans are adapted for ketogenic diets, not carbohydrate based diets.* --><!-- *It is not intended to constitute proof.* *I will refer to more rigorous articles I have written when it is relevant to do so.* --><!-- --><!-- <span style="width: 300px; float: right; text-align: left; border-top: 3px solid #000; border-bottom: 3px solid #000; padding: 10px; margin: 5px 5px 15px 15px; background-color: #FFFF99;"> --><!-- "What I'm suggesting is that --><!-- the ability of the liver to deliver optimal fuel levels on demand when you don't eat carbohydrates, --><!-- and the disruption caused to this system by eating carbohydrates, --><!-- makes it plausible that the conditions under which it works so well were the conditions under which it evolved." --><!-- </span> --><span style="width: 300px; float: right; text-align: left; border-top: 3px solid #000; border-bottom: 3px solid #000; padding: 10px; margin: 5px 5px 15px 15px; background-color: #FFFF99;">The conditions under which the liver delivers optimal fuel on demand may be the conditions under which it evolved. </span><!-- Perhaps the conditions under which the liver works so well to deliver optimal fuel levels on demand are the conditions under which it evolved. --><p>When you are on a ketogenic diet, the <em>mitochondria</em> in your cells — the parts of the cells that produce energy — actually switch from primarily using sugar for fuel to primarily using fat for fuel. They use fat mostly in a form called <em>ketone bodies (or, commonly, ketones)</em>, thus a <em>ketogenic</em> diet.</p><p>(See <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ketotic.org/2012/05/keto-adaptation-what-it-is-and-how-to.html">Keto-adaptation: what it is and how to adjust</a> for more on this process of switching fuels.)</p><div class="section" id="sugar-based-living-from-a-diet-with-more-than-about-5-calories-from-carbohydrate"><h3>Sugar-based living (from a diet with more than about 5% calories from carbohydrate)</h3><p>When you are using the sugar-based system, all of the cells in your body constantly take sugar out of your bloodstream. It's hard for your body to keep up, and you need to frequently refuel by eating carbohydrate-containing food.</p><p>Getting sugar out of the carbohydrates that you eat is a blunt tool. Unless you eat in a trickling stream, you will consume more sugar than is safe to hold in the bloodstream at once. That sugar has to be quickly removed, because high blood sugar damages your cells. So a flood of insulin comes in to initiate the process of sugar removal. There is some limited storage space in the liver, but when that is full, the rest basically gets stored as fat.</p><p>Soon however, the job is done. Your blood sugar is back in a safe range. Your body cells are still demanding sugar, though, and your blood sugar starts to drop too low. Your liver can release some sugar back into the bloodstream, but not fast enough to keep up with demand, so you get tired and hungry, and the process starts all over.</p><ul class="simple"><li><em>People on carbohydrate-based diets typically have to "snack" every couple of hours.</em></li><li><em>Endurance athletes have to stop and eat sugar just to get through their events.</em></li></ul><p><strong>On a sugar-based metabolism, you swing between too little blood sugar and too much, and you have to constantly adjust it "manually" by eating.</strong></p></div><div class="section" id="fat-ketone-based-living"><h3>Fat/ketone-based living</h3><p>On the other hand, when you are using the fat/ketone-based system, there is relatively little demand on your blood sugar. There are only a few kinds of cells that don't have the ability to use ketones (or fat) for fuel, and have to use sugar. That amount can easily be supplied by the liver, which actually manufactures sugar out of protein on demand in response to changes in blood sugar.</p><p>The liver can do this at a rate that is more than adequate for normal energy requirements, <em>when the cells that can use fat/ketones are doing so, and thus not putting extra demand on blood sugar.</em>Your body makes significant ketones only when sugar levels are consistently low.</p><ul class="simple"><li><em>It is not uncommon for ketogenic adults to comfortably eat one meal a day.</em><em>Even my children, when they are ketogenic, can go for several hours at a time without eating.</em></li><li><em>Endurance athletes on ketogenic diets don't "hit the wall". They have the ability to tap into fat stores for fuel; a supply that could last even a lean person for weeks.</em></li></ul><p><strong>On a fat/ketone-based metabolism, demand on sugar from the blood is gentle, and your liver refills it smoothly on demand as it is used, keeping it remarkably steady.</strong></p></div><div class="section" id="an-argument-for-ketogenic-metabolism-as-the-default-human-state"><h3>An argument for ketogenic metabolism as the default human state</h3><p>Think about the role of the liver here. When you are not consuming sugar in food (from carbohydrates), your liver orchestrates fuel management precisely.</p><p>The liver makes ketones out of fat, thereby supplying almost all tissues with all the energy they need. At the same time, it makes a moderate amount of sugar out of protein. That sugar is stored right in the liver in the form of glycogen. Not much is stored, but it is plenty for the purposes of keeping blood sugar steady, because the blood sugar is depleted slowly: only a few tissues draw sugar from the blood. The rest are using fat or ketones.</p><p><strong>This system is efficient and effective.</strong></p><p>By contrast, on a carbohydrate-based diet, the storage capacity of the liver overflows. The excess sugar <em>can</em> be stored as fat, but that fat is not used <em>efficiently</em> as fuel. For fat to be used efficiently as fuel, the liver would have to be turning it into ketones at a high rate <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id2" id="id1">[1]</a>. But ketones aren't produced much in a high sugar condition. It takes <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ketotic.org/2012/05/keto-adaptation-what-it-is-and-how-to.html">several days of low sugar intake to start producing significant ketones</a>.</p><!-- What I'm suggesting is that --><!-- the ability of the liver to deliver optimal fuel levels on demand when you don't eat carbohydrates, --><!-- and the disruption caused to this system by eating carbohydrates, --><!-- makes it plausible that the conditions under which it works so well were the conditions under which it evolved. --><!-- Considering how well your liver does this job when you don't eat carbohydrates, and the disruption caused by eating carbohydrates, suggests something to me: **Perhaps the conditions under which the liver works so well to deliver optimal fuel levels on demand are the conditions under which it evolved.** --><p>Considering how well the liver manages energy when you don't eat carbohydrates, and the disruption caused to this system by eating them, I would suggest:</p><p><strong>The conditions under which the liver delivers optimal fuel on demand may be the conditions under which it evolved.</strong></p></div><div class="section" id="footnotes"><h3>Footnotes</h3><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id2" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id1">[1]</a></td><td>As pointed out by Valerie and Ash in the comments, and by Carol Loffelmann on Twitter, fat remains an important fuel in its own right, increasingly so after keto-adaptation. I oversimplified here, but the point about efficient fat/ketone-based metabolism under low sugar conditions still stands.</td></tr></tbody></table><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id3" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label">[2]</td><td><p class="first">Consider a popular alternative explanation:</p><p>Noticing that excess sugar <em>can</em> be stored as fat, and yet knowing that excess fat storage is not healthy in humans, some people have argued that excess fat storage in humans represents an adaptation gone awry:</p><p>The <em>thrifty gene hypothesis</em> supposes that we used to go through periods of feast and famine, getting fat, and then using it up. People who were well adapted got fat easily, and thus survived the famines better. Here and now, where famines are rare, those people would simply get fatter and fatter.</p><p>There are at least two problems with this idea. First, the evidence doesn't seem to bear it: famines may not have been particularly common in Paleolithic times, they don't appear to have occured at all in some populations that we know later developed obesity on modern diets, and modern hunter-gathers don't get fat in times of plenty. Second, even if this were essentially correct, that would mean that humans were adapted to go through regular periods of using up the fat. In other words, it would mean humans were adapted to regular periods of ketogenic metabolism! So, at best, this theory supports ketogenic metabolism being a regular part of life in some kind of alternation with carbohydrate-based metabolism.</p><p class="last">There are animals that use this kind of strategy. Those animals hibernate. Humans can't hibernate. Even very fat humans need some level of protein to survive, to make into sugar for the few tissues that need it. If they don't get it, they will start tearing down essential muscle tissues such as heart, and they will die.</p></td></tr></tbody></table></div></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-26711960905302036502014-11-02T06:20:00.000-08:002014-11-11T21:03:48.108-08:00Experiences of a Five-Year Carnivore, Part I <div class="document" id="experiences-of-a-five-year-carnivore"> <div class="section" id="part-i-how-i-became-a-carnivore"><h3>Part I: How I became a carnivore</h3><p>It took me about three weeks to get up the nerve to try an all-meat diet. I had been reading about it since before the New Year. It seemed extreme, but I was just so desperate about my weight.</p><p>An all-meat diet is, in some ways, just a radical version of a low carb diet. I had been an advocate of low carb diets for a long time: it was 1997 that I first read <a class="reference external" href="http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/">Drs. Eades'</a> <a class="reference external" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002SXIENW/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B002SXIENW&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=theketdieforh-20&amp;linkId=FJ2NVLWR3I2ZVPIE">Protein Power</a>, gave up my vegetarian diet, and finally (easily!) lost the freshman 30 that had plagued me for for several years. Still, after my second pregnancy, my body didn't seem so willing to drop the fat even with good adherence to low carb. (I had gained a lot of fat in both pregnancies.)</p><p>I knew that a low carb diet was healthy, and that the claims about dangers of eating animal fat, and benefits of eating grains were grossly mistaken. I had been following the relevant research since I first looked up the papers cited in the Eades' book. That body of evidence was ahead of its time, and has since grown enormously. Nonethless, much of it is still not recognised today, to the detriment of the health of many people.</p><p>It was demoralising being fat while eating a diet I knew to be not only healthy but the most effective intervention for fatness. Moreover, fair or not, I felt like I wouldn't be taken seriously telling others what I knew to be scientifically true when I looked the way I did <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id6" id="id1">[1]</a>.</p><p>So when I saw people on the internet <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id7" id="id2">[2]</a> talking about eating a "zero-carb", all-meat diet <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id8" id="id3">[3]</a>, and the unparalleled success it was bringing them, I was filled with hope against hope, and I thought: "Why not?"</p><!-- <span style="width: 300px; float: right; text-align: left; border-top: 3px solid #000; border-bottom: 3px solid #000; padding: 10px; margin: 5px 5px 15px 15px; background-color: #ADFF85;"> --><span style="width: 300px; float: right; text-align: center; border-top: 3px solid #000; border-bottom: 3px solid #000; padding: 10px; margin: 5px 5px 15px 15px; background-color: #FFFFFF;"><i><b>Not even a salad?</b></i></span><p>Still, I found it intimidating. Not even a salad? Wouldn't I be bored? Most importantly, would I be able to stick to it? There is little more demoralising than making a promise to yourself that you can't keep.</p><p>So I thought about it for the first three weeks of 2009. While I was thinking about it, I decided that I could definitely give my regular low carb diet its best chance. Having been a low carb dieter for over ten years, it was a long time since I measured every meal. Perhaps I had allowed some "carb creep". I made a New Year's resolution, and counted carbs to the gram, keeping it under 20 a day. In those three weeks, I think I lost 2-3 pounds of the 60 or so I wanted gone. In the meantime I planned out meals of just meat, kept reading about the successes of others, and I set a time frame I could live with: I would eat just meat for three weeks, taking me exactly to my 36th birthday. On my birthday I would eat cake as a reward.</p><p>That birthday cake was never to be, because by the time those three weeks were up, not only had I lost about 10 pounds, but my mood had stabilised. The major-depressive-disorder-turned-<a class="reference external" href="http://www.psycheducation.org/index.html">"soft"-bipolar</a> that had been ruining my life at increasing speed since I was a teen was brought to a sudden standstill. It was utterly amazing, and no cake would ever be worth a return to that.</p><div class="section" id="a-short-detour"><h4>A short detour...</h4><p>However, shortly after my birthday, I learned I was pregnant again. I was determined to have a zero-carb pregnancy, but for a variety of reasons, this didn't come to pass <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id9" id="id4">[4]</a>. I did manage to keep my carbs low for most of the pregnancy (a first for me) and even had some zero-carb days in the third trimester.</p></div></div><div class="section" id="and-a-return"><h3>...and a return.</h3><p>A week or two after his birth, <em>five years ago now</em>, I restarted my carnivorous diet, and I've stayed on it since. It's easy <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id10" id="id5">[5]</a>. My weight quickly normalised to about 130 lbs — some 60 lbs less than I weighed at the beginning of 2009.</p><p><strong>Best of all, my mood has been stable</strong> without any medications since then, even under periods of enormous stress. For example, I have recently experienced intense grief due to life circumstances. Although the grief has been incredibly painful and difficult, it hasn't resulted in depression as I know it. While it hasn't been easy, it is simply incomparable to the emotional dysfunction of a psychiatric mood disorder. The difference between the normal mood variations I have now, and those I had then is <em>physiological</em>. It was <em>correctable</em> not by adding drugs, but by removing the drug-like components of my diet coming from plants.</p><p>(<a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/2014/11/experiences-of-five-year-carnivore-part_11.html">Continue to Part II</a>.)</p></div><div class="section" id="footnotes"><h3>Footnotes:</h3><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id6" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id1">[1]</a></td><td>See my <a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/2014/10/weight-loss-advice-from-fat-people.html">rant about equating people's personal health with the quality of their theories</a>.</td></tr></tbody></table><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id7" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id2">[2]</a></td><td>The forum I originally read is now lost, though it can be found in <a class="reference external" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20090701000000*/http://forum.zeroinginonhealth.com/">the Internet Archives</a>. It's successor is <a class="reference external" href="http://forum.zeroinginonhealth.com/">here</a>.</td></tr></tbody></table><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id8" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id3">[3]</a></td><td>The term "zero-carb" is not technically accurate; there are traces of carbohydrate in animal foods in muscle glycogen, and more than traces in others, such as liver, some shellfish, and cream. For this reason, I prefer to call the way I eat "carnivory". See <a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/2012/08/my-carnivorous-diet.html">A Carnivorous Diet</a> for more on how I eat.</td></tr></tbody></table><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id9" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id4">[4]</a></td><td>One component was that I have a strong family history of <a class="reference external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperemesis_gravidarum">hyperemesis gravidarum</a>, and though I have been able to mitigate it with pyridoxine/doxylamine, I still suffered debilitating nausea throughout all of my pregnancies. Therefore, nutrition became a secondary concern after <em>could I look at it without retching</em>.</td></tr></tbody></table><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id10" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id5">[5]</a></td><td>It may sound like eating this way would be difficult; that it would take willpower to avoid eating things we consider delicious. However, I am rather a hedonist, and I love to eat. If this took hunger or deprivation, it wouldn't be for me. I never restrict the quantity of food I eat. It turns out than when I eat this way (and I am told I am not alone), that is, once all the sugar and fiber is out of my diet, including the low amounts of sugar in fibrous fruits and vegetables, and all low sugar sources of sweetness, I feel completely satisfied and satiated by my food. <strong>I simply don't want anything else.</strong></td></tr></tbody></table></div></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-73599786432936604892014-10-24T13:59:00.000-07:002018-01-25T09:26:17.028-08:00Weight loss advice from fat people <div class="document" id="weight-loss-advice-from-fat-people"> <p>There is an assumption that is easy to make about health advice: that the health of the person giving advice is a good test of the correctness of their theories. This is a terrible mistake.</p><p>Here are a couple of reasons why it is a mistake:</p><ul><li><p class="first"><strong>It conflates what people advocate with what they do.</strong></p><p>This goes in two directions. Someone could advocate something that they don't adhere to, or they could adhere to it but do something else that, known to them or not, changes the outcome.</p><p>For example, someone could claim to gain fat on a very low carb diet, but not realise that those high-protein peanuts they are eating have signficant carbohydrate in them. Or, on the other hand, they could claim great loss, but not mention that were also taking a hormone that turned out to have made all the difference.</p></li><li><p class="first"><strong>It doesn't take into account what the person is struggling with.</strong></p><p>Someone with a strong genetic propensity to gain fat and who has been obese for a long time is simply never going to have the results from a fat loss intervention that someone with a more moderate genetic risk who has not ever been fat.</p><p>A hard gainer is never going to get as bulked up as a natural bodybuilder type, even if they find the perfect protocol.</p></li></ul><p>This latter problem would even seem to suggest that people who struggle or have struggled with health problems are <em>better</em> judges of what works and what doesn't. There is some truth to this: If someone with a health problem manages to improve it, that positive outcome suggests that someone else in the same position might also see improvement following the same plan.</p><p>Moreover, sick people, fat people, people who can't meet their goals through mainstream advice are often more likely than others to hit upon fundamental scientific misconceptions that are holding them back, or new therapies that are incredibly effective. And yet, a person who has recovered from severe diabetes, for example, may still have health measurements that don't inspire great confidence in someone who is starting out with less severe issues.</p><p>However, this is also a mistake!</p><p>If you want to evaluate whether someone's health advice is good, comparing where they started with where they are is a good starting heuristic, but it doesn't take the place of evaluating scientific research. There can always be coincidences, or relevant information you are not aware of.</p><p>People who do health research and promote their conclusions are aware that their own health is under scrutiny. They can hold themselves up as positive anecdotes of what is possible, and they should.</p><p>Anecdotes, like observational correlations, are useful for generating hypotheses. A randomised controlled trial that refutes the hypothesis must be considered better evidence than an anecdote or even a correlation generated from a large data set. On the other hand, a negative anecdote can single-handedly refute certain kinds of scientific claim.</p><hr class="docutils" /><p>It bothers me when people criticise the theories of public figures based on their personal successes. It equally bothers me when people applaud those who have lucked out genetically, and who can basically do no wrong: they will look fantastic under a variety of abuses.</p><p><strong>Take advice from fat people, if the advice is scientifically tenable.</strong></p><p><strong>Ignore advice from thin people if it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.</strong></p></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-90800816130573790332014-06-08T06:54:00.000-07:002014-06-08T08:10:03.792-07:00Dangerous Mistakes of Reading the Internet <div class="document" id="dangerous-mistakes-of-reading-the-internet"> <p>Zooko and I get a lot of questions here and on <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ketotic.org">ketotic.org</a> about our work, or about ketogenic diets. That's encouraging, and we like hearing from you! However, we often don't have time to answer questions in depth. I've decided to answer this one, because my answer to it has some common themes that transcend the particulars of the topic.</p><p>On <a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/p/eat-meat-not-too-little-mostly-fat.html">Eat meat, not too little, mostly fat</a>, Matthew Blanchard asked:</p><blockquote>I have been reading through your blogs, and I find them interesting. I am considering doing the 30 day challenge. Then I found this webpage: <a class="reference external" href="http://www.poliquingroup.com/ArticlesMultimedia/Articles/Article/1143/Eight_Common_but_Dangerous_Mistakes_of_A_High-Fat_.aspx">http://www.poliquingroup.com/ArticlesMultimedia/Articles/Article/1143/Eight_Common_but_Dangerous_Mistakes_of_A_High-Fat_.aspx</a> A lot of this information seems to contradict your research. Have you seen this before? What are your thoughts on some of this?</blockquote><div class="section" id="here-are-my-thoughts"><h3>Here are my thoughts.</h3><p>The article is called <em>Eight Common but Dangerous Mistakes of A High-Fat, Low-Carb Diet</em>. The authors have done something frustrating, but not uncommon. <strong>They have placed most of the burden of research on the reader.</strong> They have made a swath of claims in an authoritative voice followed by over a dozen references of mixed origin: from peer reviewed papers to blogs. There is no way to tell which articles and which parts of those articles are supposed to support a given claim. That means that to verify a given point, you basically have to read all or most of the articles cited (and often further the articles those articles cite!), and then you still can only guess at why the authors think it supports the claim. On <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ketotic.org">ketotic.org</a>, we aim to show the full trace of every claim we make, which we call "end-to-end citations". This allows the reader to know why we think something is true, and encourages them to look at that evidence critically. See the <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ketotic.org/p/apologia.html">Apologia</a> for more on our approach.</p><p>This approach also, unfortunately, takes <strong>much more work</strong>. I would say the vast majority of the time I spend writing an article comes from finding papers that <em>clearly support</em> what I'm claiming, even after I can find many sources that merely make the same claim. I try not to rely on authority, and I take into account the type of experiment used. On several occasions, I have found that I could not find clear support of something I assumed was true.</p><p>For example, as of last time I looked, there is no clear published research showing that lowering protein increases ketosis. I'm pretty sure that it's true: clinicians in the field say it is true, many anecdotes report it, and I've experienced it myself! However, I don't have the kind of evidence that meets my standard to <em>claim it</em>. Contrast my article <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ketotic.org/2013/02/protein-ketogenesis-and-glucose.html">Protein, Ketogenesis, and Glucose Oxidation</a> with the glib statements made in Dangerous Mistake #2. One of those statements is "if you go overboard and eat too much protein than the body needs [sic], some of the amino acids in the protein will be turned into glucose via a process called gluconeogenesis". I'm quite sure the causality implicit in this statement is wrong, and I've written a series of articles exploring that, starting with <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ketotic.org/2012/08/if-you-eat-excess-protein-does-it-turn.html">If you eat excess protein, does it turn into glucose</a>.</p><p>All that said, <em>the particular article of ours in question</em> suggests eating an all-meat diet, which is not a well-studied variation of a ketogenic diet. We've tried to be quite explicit about that. We're well aware that few ketogenic dieters do it this way all the time, and we don't have anything even approaching a randomised controlled trial to back it up with. That's why we've phrased it as an experiment; as a way to learn about how diet affects you by removing almost all confounds, including the variation in tolerance many people have to carbs. It is also true that I (and a handful of others I know) feel much healthier eating no plants, and eat essentially only meat all the time. Nonetheless, it is not very much different from the induction phase of most versions of low carb diets, which are extra restrictive for many of the same reasons as those we cite. See <a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/2014/01/wait-why-eat-only-meat.html">Wait, why eat only meat?</a> for more on how this trial is similar to induction phases, and why we advocate it.</p><p>The main statements that I disagree with in the Dangerous Mistakes article are the ones about meat and vegetables in particular. I will briefly address "Dangerous mistakes" #3, #4, and #8.</p></div><div class="section" id="poor-gut-health-due-to-a-diet-high-in-animal-protein-and-low-in-indigestible-fiber"><h3>#3. Poor gut health due to a diet high in animal protein and low in indigestible fiber</h3><p>There are two claims here. First that "low-fiber, higher animal protein diets have been found to increase inflammatory gut bacteria." I have been working on a post about the inflammatory gut bacteria <em>hypothesis</em> (which is all it is, the claims of the scientists who report it notwithstanding). So I don't have much to say about it here, except that the claims vastly outweigh the evidence, and the scientists making them appear to assume that which they are trying to prove.</p><p>The second claim is that "these bacteria release a compound called TMAO after you eat animal protein, which increases plaque buildup in the arteries, elevating inflammation." For this claim I will simply refer you to work by a researcher cited elsewhere in the Dangerous Mistakes article, Chris Masterjohn, who has shown the main problem with that claim: Meats produce no more TMAO than fruits and vegetables, or assorted grains and dairy, and the primary source of TMAO is <em>seafood</em>, not beef or other red meat. See <a class="reference external" href="http://www.westonaprice.org/blogs/cmasterjohn/does-carnitine-from-red-meat-contribute-to-heart-disease-through-intestinal-bacterial-metabolism-to-tmao/">his article</a> for details about that, and more reasons to question that claim.</p></div><div class="section" id="chronic-inflammation-from-high-intake-of-fat-and-protein-and-few-fruits-and-veggies"><h3>#4. Chronic inflammation from high intake of fat and protein and few fruits and veggies</h3><p>The support for this comes in the form of the following logical chain:</p><ol class="arabic simple"><li>In one study from Tufts, the lean mass in young people was positively associated with increased oxidative stress and inflammation.</li><li>The best explanation of the association the scientists could come up with was that these young people must have been eating fewer fruits and vegetables, because, the Dangerous Mistakes authors claim, "people who eat more animal protein tend to eat fewer plants".</li><li>Therefore, you should eat more of the particular plants that are fruits and vegetables (as opposed to, say, grains and legumes, which are also plants, I've heard...)</li></ol><p>I didn't look up the Tufts study, but this is terrible reasoning. The authors of the Tufts study presumably know that lean mass is usually associated with good health, which is why they were compelled to make something up after the fact to explain their results. (As an exercise for the reader, do an Internet search to figure out what lean mass is typically associated with.) Don't get me wrong. Making up stuff is a fine activity—scientists are expected to offer an interpretation of unexpected results—but it is irresponsible to make strong claims based on untested hypotheses, especially when you are in a position of authority.</p></div><div class="section" id="a-chronic-acid-load-that-degrades-lean-tissue-and-increases-cancer-risk"><h3>#8. A chronic acid load that degrades lean tissue and increases cancer risk</h3><p>The paper in the reference list that seems to go with this claim is called <em>Diet-induced acidosis: is it real and clinically relevant?</em>I took the time to look at it briefly. The authors of this paper do point out that the human body keeps pH tightly regulated, and that diet can only effect pH to a small degree, which stays within normal range. They then speculate that this chronic small amount of acidity <em>might</em> lead to problems such as bone loss. They further cite some studies that <em>associate</em> acid-forming foods with bone loss. They also discuss the problem of kidney stones and its potential relationship to bone loss.</p><p>I don't have time to thoroughly respond to this paper right now, but I'll touch on two points.</p><p>First, diets with high-normal amounts of protein do not lead to bone loss <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id2" id="id1">[1]</a>, and in fact the physiological changes that happen under ketogenic conditions are lean mass <em>preserving</em>. These facts alone should lead you to think that the associations cited here may not apply to a carnivorous ketogenic diet.</p><p>Second, some children on ketogenic diets for epilepsy <em>have</em> had problems with kidney stones. However, the epilepsy diet has usually been based on KetoCal shakes (full of vegetable oil), not on meat. The best remedy for kidney stones appears to be high intake of potassium citrate. Plant advocates like to note that plants are high in potassium, which is true. However, it is also true that meat has potassium, but when we cook, it is mostly lost to the drippings. Eat the drippings. Drink the broth.</p><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id2" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id1">[1]</a></td><td><p class="first">See for example, this <a class="reference external" href="http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/87/5/1567S.full">review</a>. It discusses this unsupported myth, and others. Note that it does reiterate the idea about alkalizing fruits and vegetables</p><p>"Despite a widely held belief that high-protein diets (especially diets high in animal protein) result in bone resorption and increased urinary calcium, higher protein diets are actually associated with greater bone mass and fewer fractures when calcium intake is adequate. Perhaps more concern should be focused on increasing the intake of alkalinizing fruits and vegetables rather than reducing protein sources."</p><p>but note that it is the potassium content of fruits and vegetables that leads them to that conclusion:</p><p class="last">"[N]et renal acid excretion can be predicted from the ratio of dietary protein to potassium because the dietary intake of potassium occurs mainly as salts of weak organic acids and therefore has an alkalizing effect (30, 33). This relationship may explain the reported beneficial influence of fruit and vegetables, the major dietary source of potassium, on bone health"</p></td></tr></tbody></table></div></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-8660857427677734582014-02-20T19:32:00.000-08:002014-02-20T19:32:42.075-08:00Killjoy vs. Freak Flag <div class="document" id="killjoy-vs-freak-flag"> <!-- -*- coding: utf-8-with-signature-unix; fill-column: 73; indent-tabs-mode: nil -*- --><p>I read a <a class="reference external" href="http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/02/18/julia-llewellyn-smith-sugars-spurned-prophet/">recent story by Julia Llewellyn Smith</a> about John Yudkin, an early proponent of the theory that sugar (not fat) is likely to be the main culprit behind many modern diseases. It contained the following paragraph:</p><blockquote>"One of the problems with the anti-sugar message — then and now — is how depressing it is. The substance is so much part of our culture, that to be told buying children an ice cream may be tantamount to poisoning them, is most unwelcome. But Yudkin, who grew up in dire poverty in east London and went on to win a scholarship to Cambridge, was no killjoy. “He didn’t ban sugar from his house, and certainly didn’t deprive his grandchildren of ice cream or cake,” recalls his granddaughter, Ruth, a psychotherapist. “He was hugely fun-loving and would never have wanted to be deprived of a pleasure, partly, perhaps, because he grew up in poverty and had worked so hard to escape that level of deprivation.”"</blockquote><p>While I am glad that such stories are gaining prominence, I object to the idea that saying no to ice cream, or keeping a sugar-free household makes one a killjoy.</p><p>If it were shown that the link between routine sugar consumption and heart attacks or Alzheimer's or breast cancer was, for example, even a fraction as strong as that between smoking and lung cancer, would you feel that turning down a piece of cake, or not keeping ice cream in the house, indicated insufficient desire for and approval of pleasure? Or contrary-wise, if you went to live in a place where children were normally given a cigarette after supper, would you just let it go in the name of good fun? Such a strong link has yet to be shown, but the body of evidence of such links has increased.</p><p>I contrast this idea with <a class="reference external" href="http://www.archevore.com/panu-weblog/2010/1/13/smoking-candy-cigarettes.html">an essay by Kurt Harris</a> a few years ago, containing this passage:</p><blockquote><p>"When you go to the birthday party for your neighbor’s kid, and you eat the birthday cake, what message does that send?</p><p>You show up looking trim and fit. You are pleased if people ask you how you lost weight. After eating this way for a few years, though, you are perhaps most comfortable if no one says anything at all.</p><p>You are weary of the reactions -the incredulity, the mockery, the eye-rolling. Pushing 50, you’ve tried explaining how a diet high in animal fats and low in grains works to keep you slim, but you’ve learned that the segue to explaining why you are not just cultivating an attractive corpse due to all that arterycloggingsaturatedfat that you live on is tedious and it gets you nowhere.</p><p>So, when the rectangular slab of Hy-Vee or Piggly-Wiggly birthday cake – frosted 3/8” thick with a stratum of oily granular sugar running through the middle to boot – is proferred, you say “thank you”, flash a smile that only a trained psychologist would question, and accept it, holding the flimsy paper plate and plastic fork with both hands to keep it from tumbling onto the ground.</p><p>You repair to some corner of the party where you can nibble at the cake, maybe spill a few crumbs, and eventually hide the paper plate, now soggy with vegetable oil absorbed from the corpus of the cake.</p><p>Who are the agents of acculturation here?"</p><p>[...]</p><p>"If you are a vector for cultural change, which way is the arrow pointing?</p><p>Wear your Real Food Uniform.</p><p>Active Duty.</p><p>Fly your freak-flag high.</p><p>Say no to the cake."</p></blockquote><p>Ruth may not have been deprived of sugar in her grandfather's presence, but perhaps she was deprived of something after all. As Yudkin was the author of a book entitled “<a class="reference external" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CHQOVDC/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B00CHQOVDC&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=theketdieforh-20">Pure, White and Deadly</a>”, I am left wondering at the power of acculturation to affect our choices.</p></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-19716630311609280592014-02-14T05:10:00.000-08:002014-02-14T09:38:36.286-08:00Response to Mark Sisson's assertion that vegetables are necessary for health <div class="document" id="response-to-mark-sisson-s-assertion-that-vegetables-are-necessary-for-health"> <p>Mark Sisson is the author of The Primal Blueprint, and the blog Mark's Daily Apple. His blog is a great reference, and I like his work. However, I take exception to the article he posted this week entitled <a class="reference external" href="http://www.marksdailyapple.com/do-you-really-need-to-eat-vegetables-to-be-healthy/">Do You Really Need to Eat Vegetables to Be Healthy?</a></p><p>Although he admits at the end that you probably don't need them, this admission has much less prominence than the section near the top where he says</p><blockquote><strong>"Yes. Yes, you do. Maybe not a huge amount, necessarily. But you do need some."</strong></blockquote><p>Then he goes on to make some arguments for eating vegetables that I'd like to address.</p><ol class="arabic"><li><p class="first">Modern Hunter-Gatherer diets: First he argues that three of the four known modern hunter-gatherers that are purported to be carnivorous (Inuit, Masai, and Sami — leaving out Plains Indians) weren't actually. I don't think that's really settled, but more importantly <em>it doesn't matter</em>. Even if it were true that all modern primarily carnivorous societies ate some plants, that doesn't and couldn't prove we need them.</p></li><li><p class="first">Plants as medicine: A second argument that is weaved throughout the post is that plants have medicinal compounds, and therefore should be eaten. But this doesn't make sense. This is an argument for growing plants and extracting compounds so that we can isolate and concentrate medicine into useful portions, while removing the toxins that accompany the source. It's no argument for taking daily minute doses of medicine along with a bunch of other random stuff that grew with it. I've addressed that more fully in the post <a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/2014/01/biochemical-warfare.html">Biochemical Warfare</a></p></li><li><p class="first">Missing nutrients: Another argument is about getting some particular nutrients. It is argued that modern meat may be depleted of some minerals and vitamins that are dependent on the diet of the animal. That is, there are wild plants that are part of the diet of wild animals, that they use to make vitamins that we then eat, and modern meat may be inadequate. This may well be true, but insofar as it is, it does not make a convincing argument for eating those plants ourselves, along with whatever other matter they contain, any more than it argues for taking supplements. Even if modern meat is insufficient, that is no argument for eating vegetables. Moreover, a similar argument is sometimes made about plant vitamin and mineral content due to soil depletion, so eating plants may not even solve it.</p><p>(I'm ignoring the part of that section that suggests we only need plants if we refuse to eat offal or reserve the cooking water, since they support the ability to get those nutrients from meat.)</p></li><li><p class="first">Feeding gut bacteria: Finally, the argument is made that we should eat fermentable fiber to feed our gut bacteria. Although there is much interesting research into the role of gut bacteria in health, it is far from conclusive what the best health practice is with respect to them.</p><p>As a researcher aptly pointed out in an editorial last year:</p><blockquote><p>"This considerable increase in the number of [publications devoted to the study of digestive microbiota] has generated assumptions and speculations on the role of digestive microbiota in human and animal health are likely far beyond our current knowledge." — Didier Raoult. Digestive microbiota and its influence on health: Facts and myths. Microbial Pathogenesis. 2013 Aug-Sep;61-62:A1. doi: 10.1016/j.micpath.2013.05.008. Epub 2013 May 27.</p></blockquote></li></ol><p>In sum, I respectfully disagree with Mark Sisson's statement that the question "Do You Really Need to Eat Vegetables to Be Healthy" can be answered definitively, let alone with a "yes".</p><p>I am more inclined to agree with the points he makes along the way: that if you do not eat vegetables, then you should consider eating offal, drinking broth, eating wild game, or taking supplements. In fact, I think those are worth consideration even if you do eat vegetables.</p><!-- Moreover, even if plant eating *were* a necessary component of *modern* hunter gather diets, that could be an adaptation to scarcity. Modern HGs have all had to adapt to the post-mega-fauna age in which the large, fatty game that we likely lived off of were driven to extinction. The foods that they eat don't reflect the fact we can now reliably get fatty meat, since we are no longer dependent on hunting. --></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com41tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-68963406782787588192014-02-13T10:27:00.000-08:002014-03-26T10:58:00.767-07:00Red Light, Green Light: responses to cortisol levels in keto vs. longevity research <div class="document" id="red-light-green-light-responses-to-cortisol-levels-in-keto-vs-longevity-research"> <p>How a scientist interprets outcomes often depends on whether she thinks the outcome should be good or bad.</p><p>Cortisol levels make a good example.</p><p>In the context of low carb, ketogenic diets, the finding of slightly higher cortisol levels have been interpreted as a warning sign. In <a href="http://www.ketotic.org/2014/02/the-ketogenic-diets-effect-on-cortisol.html">a recent post on our blog</a>, Zooko and I attempt to explain why the “red light” that Boston Children's Hospital gave low carb diets is not justified.</p><div class="line-block"><div class="line"><br /></div></div><div class="figure align-right"><a class="reference external image-reference" href="http://www.ketotic.org/2014/02/the-ketogenic-diets-effect-on-cortisol.html"><img alt="Boston Children's Hospital graphic (with our markup in black). Click for the original." src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-itA4o7sFYJo/UvfP_FEyffI/AAAAAAAAB1w/SvN2mznmmBA/w1041-h436-no/OBE_2012_Ludwig_Info_Graphic_NOLink_NewLogo-page2-markedup-cropped.png" style="width: 14cm;" /></a></div><p>It is interesting to note that while cortisol sends up red flags for ketogenic diets, which mainstream medicine actively disapproves of, it sends up green flags in another context: longevity research.</p><p>Time and again I have come across glib statements in longevity papers saying that the beneficial, health-enhancing and lifespan-increasing effects of caloric restriction probably come in part from the moderately increased cortisol that is consistently seen in calorie restricted animals. The intuitiveness of the beneficial effects of cortisol is usually based on cortisol's known anti-inflammatory action.</p><p>Here are just a few such quotes:</p><ul><li><p class="first">"The mechanisms responsible for calorie restriction–mediated beneficial effects on primary aging observed in rodents probably involve the metabolic adaptations to restriction itself, including... <strong>a modest increase in levels of circulating cortisol, which result in a reduction in systemic inflammation</strong>." — <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17341713">Aging, adiposity, and calorie restriction</a>. Fontana L, Klein S. JAMA. 2007 Mar 7;297(9):986-94.</p></li><li><p class="first">"Even short-term DR can attenuate inflammation and affect metabolic and DNA repair pathways. <strong>Mechanisms by which DR suppresses peripheral inflammation include the elevation of glucocorticoids</strong>, lowering of glucose and activation of PPARs. Although the effects of DR are less understood in the brain, common pathways are emerging that link many normal aging inflammatory processes with age related diseases such as AD, cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease." — <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17063034">Anti-inflammatory mechanisms of dietary restriction in slowing aging processes</a>. Morgan TE, Wong AM, Finch CE. Interdiscip Top Gerontol. 2007;35:83-97.</p></li><li><p class="first">"<strong>Glucocorticoids are yet another class of hormones that may contribute to the anticarcinogenic action of DR</strong> [101, 102]. Total and/or free glucocorticoid levels are increased by DR [103–105]. Glucocorticoids suppress cellular proliferation and enhance apoptosis in a number of cell types, including osteoblasts, lymphocytes and keratinocytes (for reviews, see Weinstein [106], Herold et al. [107] and Budunova et al. [108]). In humans, glucocorticoids are effectively used for treating lymphoid neoplasms [109]. Importantly, adrenalectomy abolishes the protective effect of DR on skin and pulmonary carcinogenesis, while glucocorticoid replacement restores this protection [110–112]. — <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17063039">Can short-term dietary restriction and fasting have a long-term anticarcinogenic effect?</a> Klebanov S. Interdiscip Top Gerontol. 2007;35:176-92.</p></li><li><p class="first"><strong>Another mechanism by which CR may selectively exert it’s anti-inflammatory effects is via enhanced endogenous corticosteroid production</strong> (Sabatino et al. 1991). Chronic CR potentiates the diurnal elevation of plasma corticosterone. CR mice and rats have “moderately” but significantly higher daily mean plasma free corticosterone concentration than mice fed “ad libitum” throughout their lifespan...</p><p>It is well known that the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis and glucocorticoids in particular are essential in limiting and resolving the inflammatory process (Sapolsky et al. 2000). Glucocorticoids have pleiotropic inhibitory effects on the immune system and inflammatory gene expression (Rhen and Cidlowski 2005). In addition, treatment with pharmacological doses of exogenous glucocorticoids has been used to block many inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, Graves’ disease, thyroiditis, glomerulonephritis, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis." — <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2652518/">Neuroendocrine Factors in the Regulation of Inflammation: Excessive Adiposity and Calorie Restriction</a> Luigi Fontana, Exp Gerontol. 2009; 44(1-2): 41–45.</p></li></ul><!-- * "The increment in glucocorticoid levels during CR has been proposed to have an important role in the beneficial effects of CR (53). It has been hypothesized that the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal glucocorticoid system plays a protective role against the moderate stress of food restriction (54), and neuroprotective properties have been described for increased glucocorticoids in restricted animals (55)." http://press.endocrine.org/doi/full/10.1210/en.2005-0378 --><!-- * It is well known that glucocorticoids play a key role in enabling mammalian species to cope with stressors (Munck et al., 1984). Indeed, Chung et al. (2001) proposed the Inflammation Hypothesis of Aging, which postulates that inflammatory processes play a key role in aging. The daily moderate elevation of plasma free corticosterone induced by CR in rats and mice would be expected to have a significant anti-inflammatory action. Overview of caloric restriction and ageing Edward J. MasoroCorresponding author contact information --><p>I particularly like that last one, because of the use of the word <em>“enhanced”</em>, which connotes that the thing that has increased is surely a Good Thing.</p><p>Now of course, the longevity researchers can't pick up on a significant difference between the animals that lived longer and those that didn't and say: Well, the diet might be good for some things, but this difference warrants caution. They can't do that because the end outcome is definitive. It's true that there is a significant school of thought that says that longevity is a result of <em>hormesis</em>. The hormetic explanation amounts to “what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.” That way a researcher gets to say that phenomenon X is bad for you, and that things that are bad for you improve your health. It is a way out of a paradox, as expressed nicely here:</p><blockquote>"One well-known, exemplified response to stress is the hormonal increase in adrenal corticosterone levels in plasma during aging, where increases in these levels appear to be proportional to the degree of stress. Aged animals appear to have a diminished ability to attenuate the increase, causing the aged to have continually elevated plasma levels of corticosterones. These authors suggested that increased levels of corticosterone in aged rats result in hippocampal neuronal cell death, that is, the stage of exhaustion. <strong>However, this scenario in the glucocorticoid cascade hypothesis is obviously not applicable in the case of the CR paradigm, because CR results in an increased life span in spite of chronically elevated diurnal levels of serum corticosterone.</strong> This apparent contradiction makes the interrelation of glucocorticoid and aging far more complex than one might want to narrowly define it and needs other mechanistic explanations like stress resistance to resolve the disparity in responses." — <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11795526">Stress resistance by caloric restriction for longevity.</a> Yu BP, Chung HY. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2001 Apr;928:39-47. (my emphasis)</blockquote><p>As <a class="reference external" href="https://twitter.com/Mommy_md">Carol Loffelmann</a> recently said on twitter: Scientists who discover paradoxes should examine their initial assumptions.</p><p>So supposing we have a study showing that a group that looks healthier than the other groups in essentially every measure also has higher levels of cortisol. We can reason, as Ebbeling et al. do, that since higher cortisol is associated with bad health outcomes, the ketogenic diet may be dangerous, despite the other measures. Or we can reason, as the longevity researchers do (and as Zooko and I did), that since the group is healthier, higher cortisol must be exerting or reflecting a healthy process, and this may present a paradox that we as researchers have to resolve.</p><p>Allow me one further point:</p><blockquote>The findings of higher cortisol in calorie restricted animals is itself a body of literature of relevance here. Anyone finding that their intervention moderately elevates cortisol can and should now say: Higher cortisol levels are found in animals whose lifespans have been increased experimentally by dietary intervention, and so this finding in our intervention could be indicative of a longevity-inducing effect.</blockquote></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-35229573366735402662014-01-18T04:21:00.000-08:002014-01-18T04:21:40.636-08:00Being, Having, and Doing: The Metaphysics of Disease <div class="document" id="being-having-and-doing-the-metaphysics-of-disease"> <p><em>This is a copy of an article I wrote for</em> <a class="reference external" href="http://highbrowpaleo.com/2011/11/22/being-having-and-doing-the-metaphysics-of-disease-2/">Highbrow Paleo</a> <em>in 2011. I have not edited it.</em></p><p>Several years ago, I had an acquaintance who had previously been diagnosed with diabetes. He began a low carb diet, against the advice of his doctor, (this was in the dark 90′s), and over a period of time his symptoms abated, until one day his doctor announced that he no longer had diabetes (though in a bizarre, but perhaps common feat of cognitive dissonance, she could not help but advise him that he “really should eat more carbs”). Of course, my friend hadn’t actually stopped being a diabetic. If he were to have started eating carbs again, as recommended, he would quickly have returned to his diabetic state. What it means to “be” a diabetic is to have the susceptibility to manifest diabetes under the right, or perhaps I should say wrong, circumstances.</p><p>We all have weaknesses, to a greater or lesser extent. We all have our own special ways in which our bodies break down in response to a poor environment. For some diseases, we call this “being”. We “are” diabetic, epileptic, alcoholic, schizophrenic. For some reason, we identify less with other diseases. A person merely “has” cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, or MS, even though these are not considered less permanent conditions once identified, even if they can go into remission. It does seem somewhat arbitrary that a person who was theretofore “normal” suddenly <em>becomes</em> or <em>acquires</em> a disease that they then are or have for the rest of their lives regardless of whether the disease continues to manifest. There may be a sense in which we are all diabetic, for example, even never having had symptoms. We all have the potential to some degree, no matter how small, and just because the degree is not yet known, it doesn’t make it not so.</p><p>In any case, what truly matters to a person who is or has or happens to know they have a genetic predisposition to such a condition, is whether or not their body is <em>doing</em> that which characterizes the disease. It is for this reason that one would seek to optimize their environment: to prevent themselves from “doing” a disease state. The Paleo diet and lifestyle is conceived with this in mind. It is reasoned both from an evolutionary standpoint: eat only that kind of food to which the body is well-adapted; and from a clinical perspective: do not eat foods which tend to cause disease. Without seeking to re-enact the environment in which we evolved — an impossible, and not particularly desirable goal (civilization does have some benefits) — one attempts to create a metabolic environment which is maximally healthful, and to which we do not tend to respond by breaking down in our various ways.</p><p>For my part, I <em>am</em> a fat person living in a reasonably fit body. (Fat is one of those rare states that we treat linguistically as transient, even though the obese, pre-obese, and post-obese have a signature metabolic profile such that a formerly fat person is not the same as a naturally thin one. This contributes to the blaming of fat people for their condition that would never be tolerated for other diseases.) I <em>have</em> <a class="reference external" href="http://www.psycheducation.org/index.html">Bipolar II</a>, but for some years now my moods have no longer been disordered, and I use no medication. I wasn’t able to achieve this with a diet that is “just” Paleo, however, or even just low in carbohydrate. My body continues to do fat and bipolar unless I eat nothing but meat (though coffee and tea are mercifully tolerated). No doubt, there are people for whom even this is not enough, and others for whom it is not necessary. My idiosyncratic susceptibilities are simply deeper than most. However, I consider it likely that a great many people will do without disease simply by following a Paleo or low carb diet, or both. If nothing else, they are starting points that make sense for anyone wishing to give their body the best chance to manifest wholeness and well-being, whatever its underlying constitution may be.</p></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-19211161835162436472014-01-13T15:17:00.000-08:002014-01-14T07:36:21.299-08:00Recent changes <div class="document" id="recent-changes"> <p>I've been at this carnivory lifestyle for years now, and I'm still learning how to improve it.</p><p>Here are two examples:</p><ol class="arabic"><li><p class="first"><strong>I stopped eating dairy products mid-November.</strong></p><p>I already knew I couldn't eat cottage cheese or yoghurt, without experiencing cravings, but I also gave up hard cheese (which I didn't eat a lot of, but sometimes at parties), butter, and heavy cream. I am slowly but surely dropping size. I've been worrying about these last 10 pounds for a couple of years, and now my regular pants are falling down. Go figure. I mean, Go, Figure! That's without extra exercise (the running I talked about in August lasted only a few weeks, and even the weightlifting I usually do was mostly left out over the holidays) and without restricting calories by design.</p><p>I interpret this to mean that dairy products were interfering with my satiety, perhaps because of the extra insulin boost they induce. Unfortunately, I haven't had serum ketone strips for a while, so I don't know if this corresponds to higher ketones or not.</p></li><li><p class="first"><strong>I more fully embraced lard.</strong></p><p>I set aside the butter, and more recently I also set aside the coconut oil. (I didn't use coconut oil when I started carnivory, but I have used it for a long time in the hopes of increasing ketones, and to enjoy in the Bullet-Proof-style coffee.) I have been known to eat mayonnaise from time to time, just because it tastes good on cold chicken, even though I would otherwise never touch soy or canola oil. I stopped doing that, too.</p><p>You know what I've re-discovered?</p><p>Bacon drippings. I've been dutifully collecting the stuff for years, filtering it through a paper towel, and frying with it. Still, it always would get to the point where I had more than I was using. But now I'm <em>eating</em> it.</p><ul class="simple"><li>With a little salt, I think it is just as good as mayonnaise for egg or chicken salad.</li><li>I blend it into broth, and a cup of that is every bit as delicious as a bullet-proof coffee in my book.</li><li>I still fry with it, but I add more than I used to.</li><li>I dip bites of leaner meat into it.</li></ul><p>I've shifted my attitude further in the direction of <strong>considering fat a food</strong>, and in <strong>considering plants to be suboptimal sources</strong>, even if they <em>happen</em> to have MCTs or high saturated fat content.</p><p>Don't forget that fat is actually an organ. Whoever said that skin was the largest organ in the body was wrong. Lard doesn't just have a <a href="http://www.empiri.ca/2013/04/on-lard-from-gary-taubes.html">beautiful fatty acid profile</a>. It has choline, a little zinc and selenium, vitamin E, and a lot of vitamin D.</p></li></ol><blockquote>Oh yeah, and in stark contrast to butter and coconut oil, it is essentially <em>free</em>. It's a by-product of something the family already eats, and my rate is still below the supply.</blockquote></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-41863228004707226592014-01-08T11:26:00.000-08:002014-01-09T10:04:49.349-08:00Wait — why eat only meat? <div class="document" id="wait-why-eat-only-meat"> <p>I want to briefly clarify our position about <a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/p/eat-meat-not-too-little-mostly-fat.html">the 30-day trial</a>. Although we <em>hypothesise</em> that there may be benefits to avoiding or minimising plants, <strong>it is definitely not necessary to avoid plants to gain the benefits of ketosis!</strong>None of the studies that form the basis of our beliefs about ketogenic diets had any such restriction. As we said in the explanation of the experiment, you can even formulate a <em>vegan</em> diet that is ketogenic.</p><p>The 30-day trial can be compared to the original Atkins (1972) induction phase <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id2" id="id1">[1]</a> or the Eades' “meat weeks” in their book <a class="reference external" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307450724/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0307450724&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=theketdieforh-20">The 6-week cure for the Middle-Aged Middle</a>. While both of those allow a small amount of certain vegetables, one basic idea is shared:</p><p><strong>More carbohydrate restriction can be more effective, especially at the beginning, even if you ultimately find a comfortable long-term diet containing more carbohydrate.</strong></p><p>In addition to minimising the carbohydrate amount, the main reason we recommend an all-meat diet for the 30-day trial is that it helps avoid these pitfalls:</p><blockquote><ul class="simple"><li>Accidentally misunderstanding carb sources (we've had several people tell us later they never realised that a food they were eating had that much carb in it).</li><li>More generally, not having to count things, which can be a source of anxiety and error.</li><li>Slippery-sloping: a little leads to a little more until the threshold is passed.</li><li>If you happen to fall on the low side of carb tolerance, you might miss the benefits entirely by choosing the wrong arbitrary cut-off, and then conclude it doesn't work for you.</li><li>Interference from food intolerances, fiber, or anti-nutrients (such as goitrogens or lectins).</li></ul></blockquote><p>Also, anecdotally, I and several people I have met had profoundly higher benefits from eating just meat. We don't know the mechanism for sure. Since you are going to all the trouble to try a keto diet anyway, you might as well find out if you are one of those at the same time.</p><p>If you are not one of those, you can go back to eating plants and no harm will have been done. I wish you much enjoyment. Vegetables can be exquisite, and I'd cry into my plate about my fate, if I didn't feel so fantastic and my choices weren't also excellent.</p><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id2" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id1">[1]</a></td><td><p class="first">I categorise the Atkins diet into 3 major releases.</p><p>In the first edition, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0006C4BC0/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B0006C4BC0&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=theketdieforh-20">Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution</a>, there were no products, and there was no notion of “net carbs” (in which you subtract fiber from your carb count). You were allowed up to 2 cups of vegetables from a short list (mostly leafy greens). In the second major release, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000K363B2/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B000K363B2&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=theketdieforh-20">Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution</a>, this becomes up to 20 grams, which he says is approximately 3 cups of salad, but which can be made up of any foods resulting in that count. The third major release, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1439190275/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1439190275&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=theketdieforh-20">The New Atkins for a New You</a>, came after his death, and was written by Drs. Westman, Phinney, and Volek. Its induction phase allows 20 grams of <em>net</em> carbs, which ultimately translates into a lot more vegetable matter.</p><p class="last">There are groups to be found on the internet who live on what they call <em>Atkins 72</em>, because they have found that only that level of restriction works for them.</p></td></tr></tbody></table></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-53013428097209017722014-01-05T14:29:00.000-08:002014-01-05T16:34:17.799-08:00Biochemical Warfare <div class="document" id="biochemical-warfare"> <p>In response to the <a class="reference external" href="http://www.empiri.ca/p/eat-meat-not-too-little-mostly-fat.html">30-day trial that Zooko and I recently recommended</a>, one correspondent argued about the importance of plant foods. He made several points I'd like to address, but the one I want to talk about here is one I've heard many times before. The statement is to the effect that plants are full of a variety of healthful compounds, many of which we have surely not even yet discovered.</p><p>This idea has an assumption behind it that I strongly disagree with: that we evolved to eat a significant amount of plant matter, and therefore we are likely to have optimised our functioning on the biochemical compounds in those plants. I disagree for the following reasons:</p><ul class="simple"><li>Whether we evolved eating a lot of plants is contentious. At the very least, there have been times and places that we had little to none.</li><li>What we do know about plants is that their survival strategy is biochemical. They generate many chemicals (many of which we surely have not even yet discovered) with which to <strong>poison</strong> their would-be eaters!</li></ul><p>My correspondent went on about his diet, listing biochemicals in the foods he eats, and lining them up with diseases those chemicals have been shown to have promise in fighting.</p><p>I agree that the biochemicals in plants often turn out to have medicinal properties that we can make use of. For those properties, the chemical typically has to be extracted to get a high enough concentration to have any effect. These compounds are much like drugs we make ourselves, in that they usually have unwanted side-effects. Commonly, they are double edged swords. For example, some plant chemicals are widely touted because they harm cancer cells. The bad news is that they also harm your <em>healthy</em> cells. So like chemotherapy, it is a matter of hoping the healthy cells survive better than the cancerous ones.</p><p>In a <a class="reference external" href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/23/131223fa_fact_pollan?currentPage=all">recent article by Michael Pollan</a>, whose brilliant slogan we bastardised without even a nod (we hope he takes it in stride) <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id3" id="id1">[1]</a>, he describes how plants produce chemicals, not just as a matter of growing, but in a real-time response to predators. For example:</p><blockquote>"One of the most productive areas of plant research in recent years has been plant signalling. Since the early nineteen-eighties, it has been known that when a plant’s leaves are infected or chewed by insects they emit volatile chemicals that signal other leaves to mount a defense. Sometimes this warning signal contains information about the identity of the insect, gleaned from the taste of its saliva. Depending on the plant and the attacker, the defense might involve altering the leaf’s flavor or texture, or producing toxins or other compounds that render the plant’s flesh less digestible to herbivores. When antelopes browse acacia trees, the leaves produce tannins that make them unappetizing and difficult to digest. When food is scarce and acacias are overbrowsed, it has been reported, the trees produce sufficient amounts of toxin to kill the animals."</blockquote><p>To think that we co-evolved with plants in symbiosis, them providing us with countless, needed medicinal concoctions, while we selectively kill them and eat them, seems a bit naive. While it's true that some species rely on having their seeds carried, undigested, for better distribution, or their pollen spread, this is does not imply they get value from having their very bodies eaten. Even that fruit and nectar need only be helpful to some species; It didn't evolve dependent on humans per se.</p><p>Finally, I find it a little sad that my correspondent is seeking to avoid disease through constant miniscule doses of medicine that are likely to be accompanied by as much toxin. There is no evidence that such a strategy has any beneficial effect. On the other hand, a ketogenic diet has increasingly stronger types of evidence suggesting it <em>will</em> protect against those diseases <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id4" id="id2">[2]</a>. As we speak, randomised clinical trials are underway to help clarify whether this is true. Such is not the case for vegetable eating.</p><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id3" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id1">[1]</a></td><td>For those of you who didn't recognise it, Michael Pollan famously recommended: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."</td></tr></tbody></table><table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id4" rules="none"><colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup><tbody valign="top"><tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id2">[2]</a></td><td>See, for example, Zooko's and my post, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ketotic.org/2013/08/the-medical-grade-diet.html">The medical-grade diet</a>.</td></tr></tbody></table></div>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3883080093308156227.post-31024477102711206482013-08-24T10:59:00.000-07:002013-08-28T12:40:48.812-07:00Deeper ketosis without protein restriction<html> <body> <p>In my last update, I had talked about the trouble I was having staying at the β-hydroxybutyrate level I wanted while eating to satiety. Not only was eating to hunger driving my ketone levels down, but higher ketone levels were correlating with irritability. Hunger and irritability are not my style. Besides, I have the intuition that something as healthy as ketosis should not entail health compromises. That's one reason I think the calorie restricted approach to ketogenic dieting, even in cancer, is likely to be wrong. More on that another day. <p>I am delighted to report that for a couple of weeks now I have consistently been in the 1.5 — 3.5 mmol/L range <b><i>without restricting the quantity of my food</i></b>, or even trying to be careful about not passing the satiety mark. Though I do, as always, emphasize fat in my foods, I am not limiting or even measuring my protein intake. My body's signals are clear and accurate and I don't agonize over whether this bite would be the line between enough and too much. There is no longer any correlation, as far as I've noticed, between irritability and higher ketone readings. <p><h3>The trick seems to be exercise.</h3> <p>A few weeks ago, I made a few lifestyle changes at once. (I don't always have time for controls!) <ul><li>I started getting up at 5:30 (amended to 5:00 several days later). </li><li>I gave up all but two small cups of coffee a day. </li><li>I started going to a weightlifting class at the local gym twice a week for an hour. I enjoy the 15 minute walk home. </li><li>I started running around the block once or twice a day in order to keep up with the 3-year-old riding his strider bike. That usually involves a little sprinting as we go the downhill direction, and walking or lightly jogging for the rest of the way. Some days I've also done a longer distance walk or bike ride. </li></ul> There could be some effect of lower carbohydrate contribution from cream, or from something disruptive in the coffee itself. However, I feel fairly confident that the driving factor is the exercise. <p><h3>Lyle McDonald: Effects of exercise on ketosis</h3><p>Way back in 2002, I got my hands on a copy of Lyle McDonald's <a href="http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/the-ketogenic-diet">The Ketogenic Diet</a>. It was out of print at the time, and was acquired for me magically by Zooko, in honour of our second anniversary. (Thank you, Sweetheart!) Back then, it was one of the few resources available for studying ketogenic physiology. Lyle McDonald's purpose in writing his book was to promote Cyclic Ketogenic Dieting for bodybuilding, and dispel myths associated with it. It is fairly technical, and well-referenced, but it does not presuppose detailed knowledge about specific biochemical pathways, so it's also accessible. <p>In it he shows that high intensity exercise (weight training or interval training) is a quick route to establishing ketosis, because it uses up glycogen stores. In the short term, however, high intensity exercise can decrease ketosis by inhibiting free fatty acid (FFA) release into the bloodstream. He also emphasizes the utility of low-intensity aerobic exercise, both for lowering glycogen and for increasing FFA for the liver to make ketones with. Low intensity aerobic exercise is very effective in establishing ketosis, but it takes a long time to deplete glycogen that way. <p>His bottom line recommendation, then, for establishing ketosis quickly, is to do a high intensity workout to deplete glycogen, followed by 10-15 minutes of low intensity aerobics. <p>This is precisely what I've been doing every day! Lifting and then walking home, sprinting and then a fast walk around the block, or a long distance, low intensity walk or ride, all qualify as efficient ketosis enhancement. <h3>This is working for me without recourse to hunger-inducing protein restriction.</h3> <p>Fat loss without muscle gain necessarily implies a caloric deficit even though caloric deficit does not necessarily result in fat loss. Analogously, inducing ketosis through exercise and carbohydrate restriction may well be resulting in a naturally lower protein intake for me. I don't really care that much. I'm eating as much as feels good to me of foods that make me well, and it is no longer interfering with my health goal of being in ketosis. <p>Whether and to what degree this affects my body composition is not yet clear. My clothes are fitting better. I guess I ought to buy a scale. </body></html>L. Amber O'Hearnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12984229591731971179noreply@blogger.com25